Kubernetes Intermediate—with Interactivity

Distributed application architectures are hard. The complexity of building containers and designing microservices to work together across a network can be overwhelming. Given evolving software, limitations on resources, and networking fallacies, you need an orchestrator to manage these variants. Kubernetes is designed to deal with these complexities so you don’t have to. Essentially a distributed operating system where you provide Kubernetes containers, and it ensures that they remain available and responsive. As a result, Kubernetes has become the preferred way to deploy and serve distributed, scalable, and resilient cloud native applications.

In this two-part series, expert Jonathan Johnson walks you through Kubernetes building blocks to demonstrate how the tool actually works. In the sessions, you’ll explore the basics of Kubernetes and how to deploy and connect your applications across a distributed application plane. You may already understand containers—the tricky part is getting a whole set of containers and services to run reliably and consistently together. Join in to learn how.

We strongly recommend registering for Kubernetes Fundamentals—Two Sessions with Interactivity before attending this intermediate course.

Session 1: Operators and Service Meshes

Kubernetes is a strong platform for running and coordinating large collections of services, containers, and applications, but even with all of its standard resources, Kubernetes can't do everything. Fortunately, Kubernetes is highly configurable and extensible, and the Operator pattern has emerged from this focus on extensibility. In this first session, you’ll explore how to install and control operators. We’ll also look at a few common frameworks to create your own operators.

Increasingly, solutions on Kubernetes follow the Operator pattern, so every Kubernetes developer must get familiar with it. Many architectures, such as Kafka, Kubeflow, Istio, progressive delivery, queuing and messaging, and data handling, are installed and maintained with Operators. A common operator to add to Kubernetes is a service mesh. As your Kubernetes solutions grow you’ll become a victim of your own success, and it may be time to consider adding a service mesh. In the second part of this session, you’ll learn why architects are adding service meshes to their clusters to help solve the growing complexities of connectivity, security, and observability. You’ll get some hand-on experience with exploring a service mesh that you may want to consider adding to your cluster.

Session 2: Observability and CI/CD Pipelines

The complexity of distributing and orchestrating multiple applications onto clusters necessitates the usage of observability and automated CI/CD pipelines. Your DevOps team must ensure that your platform is healthy and its delivery system is as frictionless as possible. Observability encompasses the insightful metrics, logs and tracing produced when applications run on the cluster. Jonathan will explore common operators and dashboards that can be used to help you ensure your applications are healthy and optimally tuned to the cluster and user experience. In this session, you'll learn why Kubernetes is an excellent platform for hosting your continuous tools, pipeline engines, registries, testing, code analysis, security scans, and delivery workflows. You'll leave understanding the latest tools and techniques for pipelining on Kubernetes. Jonathan will also address the importance of a well–trained team with a variety of skill sets to be successful with hosting applications on Kubernetes.

Hands-on learning

Note: With today’s registration, you’ll be signed up for two sessions. We recommend participating in both sessions and pursuing the interactive labs and challenges in the days between and after the sessions.

Interactive labs

Hands-on labs are integrated throughout the course to provide practical experience. All exercises are provided as O'Reilly interactive labs—complete development environments that are preconfigured with everything you need. There's nothing to install or configure; just click a link and get started! You can explore, experiment, and tinker without fear of breaking anything. And you can revisit them anytime after class ends to practice and refine your skills.

Interactive challenges

At the end of the first session, Jonathan Johnson will offer you a few skills challenges—an interactive scenario-based evaluation to help you determine whether you’ve acquired the skills taught in the live training and whether you’re ready to apply these skills in a real-world setting. To reinforce your learning, we strongly recommend pursuing the provided interactive labs. If you’re unable to complete the challenges, try reviewing the video recording of the live training (emailed to you 24 hours after each session) for tips.