Course Overview
Master the essentials of Kubernetes in this intensive 2-day crash course. This is a condensed version of our comprehensive 5-day class, focusing strictly on the core fundamentals of container orchestration, deployments, and services. It is the perfect fit for developers and DevOps professionals who need to get up to speed quickly but don't have the time or budget for the full 5-day training. You will still gain practical, hands-on experience with real-world scenarios, ideal for those working with vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, AKS, GKE, or other distributions.
Who should attend
Developers and DevOps engineers who need working Kubernetes skills quickly and cannot commit a full week, and teams evaluating Kubernetes who want a grounded view before deciding. It also works well as a shared baseline for a whole team, ahead of sending a smaller group on the full course.
What you'll learn
- Understand why orchestration exists, and how the control plane and worker nodes fit together
- Drive a cluster with kubectl, both imperatively and from YAML definitions
- Deploy and scale workloads with Pods, ReplicaSets and Deployments
- Expose applications using Services, Ingress and the Kubernetes Gateway API
- Keep workloads healthy with startup, liveness and readiness probes, and with resource requests and limits
- Persist data with volumes, PersistentVolumeClaims and StatefulSets
- Configure applications with ConfigMaps and Secrets
Course Prerequisites
Students are expected to have basic knowledge of a Container runtime such as Podman or Docker. At a bare minimum students should be familiar with Images, Containers, Volumes, Repositories. We advise students to follow our DOCKER-4K8S (or the full DOCKER-CORE)
Outline
If you are looking for our full 5-day class, check out K8S-CORE. In case you are looking for a course to set up and manage a cluster, we also offer the admin course K8S-ADMIN. Those longer courses also prepare you for the official exams (CKAD and CKA respectively).
This crash-course is not a different, lighter course. It runs on the same courseware as the five-day masterclass, taught by the same instructors, using the same labs on a real cluster. We simply stop earlier. That means nothing here has been watered down to fit two days: the depth is still in the material, and the sections we skip are named openly below rather than quietly omitted. If your team later wants the rest, it is waiting for you.
Kubernetes Introduction
- Introduction to kubernetes
- Understand the need for orchestration
- Introduce the Kubernetes Control Plane
- Understand Master and Worker Nodes
- Interacting with your cluster using kubectl
Core Kubernetes Objects and Resources
- managing objects using kubectl and yaml
- Understand and define Pods
- Appreciate the power and ease of ReplicaSets
- Understand how Deployments ease working with workload objects
- Creating Services
- Using probes to monitor container availability (e.g., startupProbe, livenessProbe, readinessProbe)
- Setting up resource requirements and limits (CPU, RAM, storage)
Ingress and Gateway API
- Introduce Ingress
- Configure Ingress using annotations and CRDs
- Introduce Gateway API
- Define Gateways for your cluster
- Define HTTPRoutes to manage traffic to applications
Storage and Stateful Services
- Introduce the concept and need for volumes
- Using ephemeral volumes (hostPath, EmptyDir)
- Introduce cloud volumes (gcePersistentDisk, awsElasticBlockStore, azureDisk)
- Define and use PersistentVolumeClaim (PV) and PersistentVolumeClaims (PVC)
- Introduce StatefulSets (sts)
Configuration and Secrets
- Introduce configMaps
- Defining configMaps using YAML
- Accessing ConfigMaps through the environment and configMap volumes
- Defining and using Secrets
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from the 5-day Core Kubernetes Masterclass?
It is the same courseware and the same instructors, cut down to what fits in two days. You still cover the objects, services, ingress, storage and configuration properly. What is left out is RBAC and cluster security, Kustomize, Operators and CustomResourceDefinitions, Jobs, Prometheus and the wider tooling, along with the time the full course spends going a layer deeper and troubleshooting. If you want all of that, book K8S-CORE.
Why choose this over a standalone two-day Kubernetes course?
Because this one is a condensed cut of a course we genuinely teach in full, rather than a short course designed to be short. Nothing has been simplified to make it fit; material has been left out, and we tell you exactly what. Your trainer teaches the five-day version too, so when a question runs deeper than the syllabus you get a real answer rather than a deferral.
Does this prepare me for the CKAD exam?
What are the prerequisites?
Basic container knowledge, meaning images, containers, volumes and registries, with Docker or Podman. Our DOCKER-4K8S course is ideal preparation, or the full DOCKER-CORE.
How hands-on is the course?
You work on a real cluster throughout, deploying, exposing, scaling and configuring actual workloads. The labs are the same ones used on the five-day course, so they are built for depth rather than written down to fit a short format.
Do I need to install anything on my laptop?
No. Every student gets their own pre-configured cloud machine with a running cluster, so all you need locally is an SSH client (already present on Linux, macOS and Windows). Work in the editors installed on the machine (vim, LazyVim, Emacs) or connect your own with VS Code Remote Development or IntelliJ's SSH remote development. Login details are emailed a week before the course.
How long is the Kubernetes Crash-course?
2 days, on-site or online. Sessions can run on consecutive days or be spread out to fit your team's schedule.
How large are the groups?
Capped at a size the trainer can still take questions from: at most 20 on-site.
In which languages can the course be delivered?
English, French or Dutch.
