Kubernetes
- Kubernetes (K8s) is the industry-standard container orchestration platform, originally developed by Google and now maintained by the CNCF.
- Kubernetes manages containerized workloads across clusters of machines - handling scheduling, scaling, self-healing, networking, storage, and secrets.
- OCI images built with Docker work natively on Kubernetes. The runtimes differ (
containerd/CRI-Oinstead of Docker Engine), but the image format is standardized.
What This Section Covers
Section titled “What This Section Covers”| Section | Topics |
|---|---|
| Foundations | Container orchestration, K8s architecture, API & object model, kubectl reference |
| Core Workloads | Pods, Deployments, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, Jobs, CronJobs, Namespaces, Scheduling, Resource Management |
| Networking | Services, Ingress & Gateway API, Network Policies, Service Discovery |
| Configuration & Storage | ConfigMaps, Secrets, Volumes, PersistentVolumes, Wasm on Kubernetes |
| Security & Access Control | RBAC, Pod Security Standards, Threat Model, TLS & cert-manager |
| Cluster Operations | kubeadm setup, upgrades, etcd backup, troubleshooting applications, troubleshooting clusters, logging & monitoring |
| Extensibility & Ecosystem | CRDs & Operators, Helm, Kustomize, GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux), cheatsheet |
Prerequisites
Section titled “Prerequisites”Before diving into Kubernetes, you should be comfortable with:
- Docker Containers - how containers work
- Docker Compose - declarative multi-container definitions (Compose concepts map to K8s manifests)
- Docker Networking - overlay networks, service discovery
- Container Orchestration - why single-host Docker doesn’t scale