Learning Tracks

Pick a track based on your experience level. Each track builds on the previous one. You can also skip around; every lab is self-contained.

Beginner Track (~2 hours)

Your first day with Kubernetes. Covers the fundamentals every developer needs.

#	Lab	What You Learn	Time
01	Simple App	Your first Deployment and Service	~5 min
17	ConfigMaps & Secrets	Passing config and credentials to pods	~10 min
16	Service Types	How to expose apps (ClusterIP, NodePort, LB)	~15 min
27	PersistentVolumes	Where pods store data	~10 min
11	Jobs & CronJobs	Running batch and scheduled tasks	~10 min
07	YAKD	Visualize what you built	~5 min
25	kubectl Debug	What to do when things break	~10 min

Intermediate Track (~3 hours)

You can deploy apps. Now learn to do it well: packaging, multi-environment, reliability, security.

#	Lab	What You Learn	Time
02	Helm	Package apps as reusable charts	~10 min
03	Kustomize	Manage dev/prod without copy-paste	~10 min
18	Probes & Lifecycle	Health checks and graceful shutdown	~15 min
23	Deployment Strategies	Rolling, blue/green, canary rollouts	~15 min
10	StatefulSet	Stable identity for databases and caches	~15 min
12	DaemonSet	One pod per node (log agents, monitors)	~10 min
26	Multi-Container	Sidecar, adapter, ambassador patterns	~10 min
13	HPA	Auto-scale pods based on CPU load	~15 min
14	RBAC	Who can do what in the cluster	~10 min
19	Network Policies	Lock down pod-to-pod traffic	~15 min
20	Resource Quotas	Prevent namespace resource exhaustion	~10 min
08	Headlamp	Full-featured cluster dashboard	~10 min

Advanced Track (~2.5 hours)

Production patterns: GitOps, operators, TLS automation, HA databases, observability.

#	Lab	What You Learn	Time
04	ArgoCD	GitOps with auto-sync and self-heal	~20 min
05	Cert-Manager	Automated TLS certificate lifecycle	~15 min
06	Redis	Caching with a live performance dashboard	~15 min
09	CloudNativePG	HA PostgreSQL with automatic failover	~15 min
22	Prometheus & Grafana	Monitoring stack, PromQL, alerts	~20 min
51	OpenTelemetry & Tracing	Distributed tracing with Jaeger	~20 min
21	Pod Disruption Budgets	Availability during cluster maintenance	~10 min
24	Pod Security	SecurityContext and Pod Security Standards	~10 min
15	CRDs & Operators	Extend Kubernetes with custom resources	~20 min
28	Vault	Production secret management	~20 min
29	External Secrets	ESO syncs Vault into K8s Secrets	~15 min
30	Tekton Basics	Cloud-native CI/CD pipelines	~15 min
31	Tekton CI/CD	Full build-test-deploy pipeline with triggers	~20 min

Real-World Track (~4 hours)

Multi-service production architectures. These labs are resource-intensive. Run one at a time and allocate at least 6 CPUs and 12GB RAM to minikube.

#	Lab	What You Learn	Time
32	Microservices Platform	Frontend, API, worker, Redis queue, PostgreSQL	~30 min
33	API Gateway (Kong)	Route, rate-limit, and authenticate requests	~25 min
34	Event-Driven (Kafka)	Async messaging with producers and consumers	~30 min
35	EFK Logging	Centralized log collection and visualization	~25 min
36	ML Model Serving	FastAPI prediction service with HPA	~20 min
37	GitOps Full Loop	Tekton CI + ArgoCD CD end-to-end	~30 min
38	Multi-Tenant Platform	Isolated namespaces, quotas, RBAC, network segmentation	~25 min
39	Chaos Engineering	Break things deliberately and watch recovery	~20 min
40	Progressive Delivery	Canary with automated traffic shifting	~25 min

Advanced Tools Track (~3 hours)

Extend your cluster with service mesh, policy engines, backup, and more.

#	Lab	What You Learn	Time
41	Istio Service Mesh	Traffic management, mTLS, observability	~30 min
42	Kyverno	Policy enforcement and resource mutation	~20 min
43	Velero	Backup and disaster recovery	~20 min
44	Sealed Secrets	Git-safe encrypted secrets	~15 min
45	Vertical Pod Autoscaler	Auto-tune resource requests	~15 min
46	Advanced Ingress & Routing	Gateway API, Traefik, HTTPRoute, middleware	~30 min
47	Reloader	Auto-restart on config changes	~10 min
48	Knative Serving	Serverless scale-to-zero workloads	~20 min
49	Trivy Operator	Container vulnerability scanning	~15 min
50	Falco	Runtime threat detection with eBPF	~20 min