Kubernetes is the open-source container orchestrator that grew out of Google's internal Borg system. It schedules containers across a cluster of machines, restarts them when they fail, scales them up and down, manages their networking, and tracks the desired state of the system as declarative YAML. Most of the cloud-native ecosystem (Helm, ArgoCD, Istio, Prometheus, Jaeger) assumes Kubernetes is the substrate.
Running Kubernetes well is a different skill from using it. Most teams start on a managed cluster (EKS, GKE, AKS) and treat the control plane as a black box. The work that consumes their time is application packaging (Helm charts, Kustomize), deployment pipelines (ArgoCD, Flux), observability (Prometheus + Grafana + Loki), and figuring out which CRDs are actually worth installing.
What you'll work with in these 23 courses
- Core resources: Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingresses, ConfigMaps, Secrets
- Networking: ClusterIP vs NodePort vs LoadBalancer, Ingress controllers, NetworkPolicies
- Storage: PersistentVolumes, StatefulSets, CSI drivers
- Helm and Kustomize for templating; ArgoCD / Flux for GitOps
- Observability: Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging
- Security: RBAC, Pod Security Standards, secrets management, policy controllers