Core Kubernetes Workshop

The Value Beyond the Hype

The absolute best Kubernetes workshop on the market. Everything you need to be successful with Kubernetes.

Developers flocked to Kubernetes as a production-grade container orchestration system. But they quickly realized that the true value is in its consistent, declarative, and idempotent API. Kubernetes has become an indispensable tool in unlocking extraordinary amounts of DevOps orchestration and automation.

"This is the best quality technical training I've ever attended."

SuperOrbital student

Knowing Kubernetes is now table stakes. Look at any job posting or any resume. It's now a de facto expectation that software engineers are as familiar with Kubernetes as they are in the Linux command line.

Unfortunately, Kubernetes is also incredibly complex. There are a myriad of moving pieces and new concepts, making it difficult to see the forest for the trees.

This workshop covers everything your team needs to make the most out of Kubernetes.
Book a private workshop for your team

Outline

Everything you need to know to deploy your production applications to Kubernetes.

Architecture Overview

  • Cloud-Native Concepts
  • Kubernetes Cluster Topology
  • Kubernetes Components

Pods

  • What is a Pod?
  • How Pods run
  • Interacting with Pods
  • Configuring Pods
  • How Pods fail

Managing Resources

  • Understand the kubectl patterns
  • Imperative Porcelain Commands
  • Creating Objects From YAML
  • The Dark Arts of Apply

Deployments

  • Advantages Over Replication Controllers
  • Creating & Updating Deployments
  • Interacting with Deployments
  • Scaling
  • Rolling Updates and Understanding MaxSurge & MaxUnavailable

Services

  • The Networking Model
  • Service Discovery via Environment Variables and DNS
  • How to use ClusterIPs, NodePorts and LoadBalancers
  • How the Services Build on Each Other
  • Exploring IPTables

Labels & Annotations

  • Using Labels for Glue
  • Finding Objects Using Simple Equality-based Selectors
  • Going Deeper With Advanced Set-based Selectors
  • Using Annotations for Metadata and Directives
  • How to Quarantine Sick Pods

Namespaces

  • Uses for Namespaces
  • Creating, Updating and Destroying
  • Managing Contexts
  • Best Practices

Beyond Deployments

  • Batch Jobs for One-Off Tasks
  • CronJobs for Scheduled Work
  • DaemonSets for Cluster Configuration

ConfigMaps & Secrets

  • Choosing Between Them
  • The Many Ways of Building Them
  • Consuming in Your Pod via Environment Variables and Volumes
  • Dealing with propagation of updates

Ingress

  • How Ingress Compares to Services
  • Cloud vs Internal Ingresses
  • Routing for Different Hosts and Paths
  • Deploying & Configuring the Nginx Ingress

Health Checks

  • Liveness & Readiness Probes
  • HTTP, TCP and Exec Handlers
  • Tweaking Handler Configuration
  • Lifecycle Handlers: postStart & preStop
  • Achieving True Zero-Downtime Deployments

Multi-container Pods

  • How Multi-container Pods Work
  • Sharing the Network Namespace
  • Sharing Volumes
  • Init Containers
  • Sidecars to Overcome Legacy Logging

Volumes

  • The History of Volumes in Kubernetes
  • Understanding Dynamic Storage and PVCs
  • Mounting Persistent Cloud-based Disks

Stateful Sets

  • How They Differ from Deployments
  • Stateful Identities
  • Using with Headless Services
  • Volume Claim Templates

Intro to Helm

  • Understand Helm
  • Finding and using 3rd party charts
  • Hydrate them to inspect the deployed YAML
  • Install them in your cluster

Intro to Kustomize

  • How Kustomize Differs From Helm
  • Using With a Single Repository
  • Bases and Overlays

Keeping Up

Sources to follow and to avoid while keeping up with changes in Kubernetes.

The 411

This workshop is delivered over five afternoons or mornings. Each session consists of four hours of lecture and labs with open Q&A at the end of each day — 20 hours in total. The price is $29,000 and attendance is limited to up to 28 students.

Instructors

Rob Salmond
Engineer & Lead Trainer
Serving an extended sentence in the YAML mines. Claims innocence.

Andrea Giardini
Kubernetes Trainer
Interested in unconventional ideas, people and lifestyles.

Intended Audience

This course covers the core Kubernetes concepts. We recommend this course for your wider application delivery and platform operations teams.

To get the most out of this subject, students should come prepared with an understanding of rudimentary Bash scripting, the basics of Linux networking, processes, users, and permissions, and the fundamentals of containerization. A good place to start is our Docker course, but it's by no means a prerequisite.

This is just one of the many great courses in our cloud-native curriculum!

Reach out to schedule the best workshop your team's ever attended.

The SuperOrbital Difference

We're infrastructure experts with a reputation for delivering great work. Here’s how we're different:

Battle Hardened

We bring real experience.

We don't just teach: we do. We've wrestled with Kubernetes, Terraform, Istio, Docker and all of the others in real production situations. We've used them in anger. We know where the tools fall down and what the documentation hides.

Unbiased

We give the best advice for your situation.

We believe in cloud native solutions, but we aren't beholden to any vendor. Every situation is unique, and every tool has flaws. We help you understand how the technologies work together to solve your problems. We guide you away from the tools that are hype, and toward those that have proven their worth.

Intensely Hands-On

More than 50% of the time spent in labs.

That's not a typo. We don’t believe in static, podium-based training with some boring instructor talking at you.

Instead, SuperOrbital courses immerse you in an active learning environment where you can internalize the lessons through collaboration and hands-on workshops. The end result is knowledge that sticks, and a foundation for true expertise.

Thorough

You can't understand the big picture without the details.

We dig deep into a topic, when creating our content. We tease apart every aspect, breaking it down into it's atomic parts. Then we rearrange them into an order our students can easily digest and remember. Our content goes deep, giving you a foundational understanding of how things work under the hood.

Remote first

We're passionately remote-first, and our training shows it.

The days of hours wasted commuting to work are coming to an end, and good riddance. SuperOrbital has always been a passionately remote-first company, and we bring that to our training.

Why travel out of town to sit in a hot, crowded, uncomfortable room for days at a time? Our workshops are taken from the comfort of your own home, and at a schedule that encourages deep learning.

Each of our workshop days consists of three hours of training and a one-hour Q&A session. This helps keep the training active and inspiring, and gives plenty of time for the knowledge to gel.

Need more convincing? Let's talk!

How it works

Engaging with us to provide a workshop for your team is easy. Reach out to get started.

1

Chat

We'll schedule a time to meet, discuss your needs, your team's experience level, and how we can help. Once we agree on an outline and a delivery date, we're ready to go!

2

Deliver

Each workshop day consists of three hours for lecture and labs, and one hour for open questions. We always have one instructor and one TA on hand to ensure things go off without a hitch.

3

Follow Up

We follow up afterward to ensure the workshop exceeded your expectations, and to help with whatever new hurdles your team may be facing.

Schedule the best training your team will ever attend, today!