Kubernetes

Container orchestration from basics to production: pods, services, deployments, Helm, and GitOps.

Overview

The complete Kubernetes learning path from pods and services to production operations with Helm, monitoring, security, and GitOps workflows. Kubernetes has become the industry standard for container orchestration — it runs the infrastructure behind Google, Spotify, Airbnb, and the majority of cloud-native companies. Understanding K8s is increasingly essential for backend engineers, not just infrastructure teams.

Kubernetes solves the hard problems of running containers at scale: automated deployment and rollback, horizontal scaling, self-healing (restarting failed containers), service discovery and load balancing, secret management, and storage orchestration. But its power comes with complexity — the learning curve is steep, and production operations require deep understanding of networking, storage, security, and observability.

This roadmap takes you through Kubernetes systematically: cluster architecture (control plane, nodes, etcd), core workloads (Pods, Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets), networking (Services, Ingress, Network Policies), storage (PVs, PVCs, StorageClasses), configuration (ConfigMaps, Secrets), Helm for package management, GitOps with ArgoCD, observability (Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing), security (RBAC, Pod Security Standards), and production operations (HPA, cluster autoscaling, disaster recovery).

By completing this roadmap, you will be able to deploy and manage production applications on Kubernetes, implement GitOps workflows, set up comprehensive monitoring and alerting, apply security best practices, and confidently discuss K8s architecture in interviews. The CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) exam serves as an excellent milestone to validate your skills.

Interview questions

  • How long to learn Kubernetes?
  • Managed K8s or self-hosted?
  • Do I need to learn Docker before Kubernetes?
  • What is the difference between a Pod and a Container?
  • Should I get the CKA certification?
  • What monitoring tools should I learn with Kubernetes?

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