Kubernetes
Deep dive into Kubernetes — architecture, engineering, and security. From pods and services to RBAC, service mesh, and cluster hardening.
15 lessons in order
What is Kubernetes?
Why Kubernetes exists, the problem of managing containers at scale, and how declarative orchestration replaces manual chaos.
Kubernetes Architecture — Control Plane & Worker Nodes
An inside look at how the Kubernetes control plane coordinates with worker nodes to keep your cluster healthy and in state.
Pods, ReplicaSets, and Deployments
Understand the core workload abstractions in Kubernetes, why pods aren't created standalone, and how Deployments orchestrate life and death across your cluster.
Services and Networking
How Kubernetes routes traffic from the outside world to the right pod — Services, Ingress, DNS, and the networking model that makes it all work.
ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Storage
How Kubernetes handles configuration, sensitive data, and persistent storage — from ephemeral volumes to dynamically provisioned disks.
Deployments and Rolling Updates
How Kubernetes updates your applications without downtime — rolling updates, blue-green deployments, canary releases, and rollback strategies.
Scaling — HPA, VPA, and Cluster Autoscaler
The three dimensions of Kubernetes scaling — more pods, bigger pods, more nodes — and when to use each.
Helm and Package Management
How Helm packages, versions, and manages Kubernetes applications — charts, values, releases, and when to use Kustomize instead.
Observability — Logs, Metrics, and Tracing
The three pillars of Kubernetes observability — logs, metrics, and distributed traces — and the tools that collect, store, and visualize them.
CI/CD for Kubernetes — GitOps, ArgoCD & Flux
How modern engineering teams deploy to Kubernetes using Git as the single source of truth, contrasting traditional push pipelines with GitOps pull engines.
Service Mesh — Istio, Linkerd & Ambient Mesh
Decouple networking logic from application code. How service meshes handle mTLS encryption, traffic splitting, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing.
RBAC and Access Control
Enforce least privilege across human operators and automated workloads using Roles, ClusterRoles, and ServiceAccounts in Kubernetes.
Network Policies and Pod Security
Shut down the flat, allow-all default networking in Kubernetes using NetworkPolicies, Pod Security Standards, and container security contexts.
Secrets Management and Encryption
Why native Kubernetes Secrets are not truly secret, how to enable etcd encryption at rest, and production patterns using External Secrets Operator and Vault.
Cluster Hardening and Supply Chain Security
Build an end-to-end defense in depth pipeline: image signing with Sigstore, policy admission controllers (OPA/Kyverno), and runtime threat detection with Falco.