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Kubernetes Mastery
Go from running pods to owning cluster architecture, RBAC, networking, and production SRE practice.
CREATED BY
A
Ananya S. [PLACEHOLDER] ★ 4.9
Senior Software Engineer at ConnectIn | 7+ years of experience
About this Path
For DevOps and Platform engineers who know the basics and need to operate Kubernetes at production scale. This roadmap covers cluster internals, multi-tenancy, networking deep-dives, GitOps, cost optimization, and the SRE runbook for common failure scenarios. Prepares you for CKA, CKAD, and senior platform engineering interviews.
Path Overview
Advanced LevelCertificate of CompletionAbout 55 hours to completeEnglish language22+ curated videosLearn online at your own pace6 modules with resourcesGamified & interactive
Path Curriculum
etcd: data model, raft consensus, and backup strategies
Key-value store layout, watch mechanism, defragmentation, and disaster recovery.
kube-apiserver admission chain: validators and mutating webhooks
Writing OPA/Gatekeeper policies and custom admission webhooks in Go.
Scheduler deep-dive: predicates, priorities, and custom schedulers
Node affinity, taints/tolerations, pod topology spread, and scheduler extenders.
Controller manager and custom controller patterns
Reconciliation loop, leader election, work queue, and controller-runtime scaffolding.
Deployment strategies: rolling, blue-green, canary with Argo Rollouts
maxSurge and maxUnavailable tuning, analysis templates, and automated rollback triggers.
StatefulSets and persistent volumes for stateful workloads
Headless services, volumeClaimTemplates, storage classes, and PVC retain policies.
ConfigMaps, Secrets, and external secrets with Vault and ESO
External Secrets Operator, Vault agent injector, and secret rotation without pod restarts.
Jobs, CronJobs, and init container patterns
Parallelism, completion modes, database migration init containers, and job failure handling.
CNI plugins: Calico, Cilium, and eBPF-based networking
Pod network CIDR routing, BGP peering with Calico, and Cilium network policy enforcement.
Service types, kube-proxy, and iptables vs IPVS
ClusterIP internals, NodePort hairpinning, LoadBalancer with MetalLB, and IPVS trade-offs.
Ingress controllers: NGINX, Traefik, and Gateway API
Rate limiting annotations, TLS termination, upstream health checks, and canary routing.
NetworkPolicy: micro-segmentation and zero-trust enforcement
Deny-all baseline, namespace-scoped allow rules, and Cilium Layer 7 policy.
Prometheus + Grafana stack for Kubernetes metrics
kube-state-metrics, node-exporter, recording rules, and SLO-based alerting.
Loki and structured logging best practices
Log aggregation pipeline, LogQL queries, and correlating logs with traces in Grafana.
RBAC and PSA: principle of least privilege in practice
Role vs ClusterRole design, service account hardening, and Pod Security Admission enforcement.
Multi-tenancy patterns: vcluster, Capsule, and Hierarchical Namespaces
Hard vs soft tenancy, resource isolation, and tenant self-service with guardrails.
ArgoCD: app-of-apps, ApplicationSets, and multi-cluster deployments
Cluster generators, Git repo structure conventions, and drift detection alerting.
Helm advanced: library charts, schema validation, and chart testing
Reusable library chart patterns, values schema enforcement, and ct lint/test pipelines.
Kustomize: overlays, components, and transformer plugins
Base and overlay structure, strategic merge patches, and name suffix transformers.
Autoscaling: HPA, VPA, KEDA, and Karpenter
Custom metrics with KEDA, VPA mode selection, and Karpenter node provisioner configuration.
Cluster cost optimization: rightsizing and spot instance strategies
Goldilocks recommendations, spot interruption handling, and cost allocation by namespace.
Production incident runbook: OOMKill, pending pods, and etcd pressure
Systematic kubectl debug workflow for the five most common production Kubernetes failures.
CKA/CKAD exam strategy and timed practice lab
Imperative kubectl speed drills, alias setup, and high-value exam question patterns.
What you'll learn
- ✓Architect multi-tenant clusters with Namespaces, RBAC, NetworkPolicies, and resource quotas.
- ✓Diagnose and resolve production incidents including CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKill, and failed scheduling.
- ✓Design service mesh topologies with Istio for mTLS, traffic shaping, and observability.
- ✓Implement GitOps workflows using ArgoCD with app-of-apps patterns and automated sync policies.
- ✓Optimize cluster cost and performance using VPA, HPA, KEDA, and node auto-provisioner.
- ✓Extend Kubernetes with custom controllers and operators written using the controller-runtime SDK.