Kubernetes Fundamentals
Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration and a baseline skill for staff and principal engineers. This course builds the core mental models — reconciliation, label selectors, rolling updates, health gating, and scheduling — so you can reason about production clusters with confidence. Each lesson pairs real YAML and kubectl with a runnable JavaScript model of the underlying control logic.
5 lessons · ~2 hours
1. Orchestration Core
Pods, Deployments & the reconcile loop
A Pod is the smallest deployable unit; a Deployment declares desired replicas and controllers reconcile actual state toward it.
Services & label selectors
Services provide a stable address for a fluid set of Pods, finding their backends entirely through label selectors.
Rolling updates & rollbacks
Deployments replace Pods gradually under maxSurge and maxUnavailable limits, keeping the service available and rollback one command away.
Config, secrets & health probes
Externalize configuration with ConfigMaps and Secrets, and let liveness and readiness probes decide which Pods restart and which receive traffic.
Scaling & scheduling
Resource requests drive both autoscaling decisions and how the scheduler bin-packs Pods onto nodes with enough free capacity.