1: History and Motivation
Evolution of application deployment over the past 20 years.
3: Installation and Set Up
Configure your local and remote lab environments.
4: Built-in Kubernetes Resources
Covers the resource types that are included with Kubernetes.
•Pod
•Job
5: Helm
Using helm to manage Kubernetes resources
6: Demo Application
Example microservice application.
7: Deploying the Demo Application
Kubernetes manifests to deploy the demo application.
8: Extending the Kubernetes API
Explore how custom resources can add functionality
9: Deploying Auxiliary Tooling
Install additional software to enhance the deployment.
10: Developer Experience
Improving the DevX when working with Kubernetes.
13: Cluster and Node Upgrades
How to safely upgrade your clusters and nodes.
14: Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery
Implement CI/CD for your applications (with GitOps!)
Demo Application Overview
To practice what we've learned we will deploy a small but realistic web application. The source code lives in the course repository.
Architecture
- React frontend – queries the APIs and renders their responses.
- Node.js API and Go API – two implementations of a simple service exposing
/and/pingendpoints. - PostgreSQL database – stores timestamps and tracks how many calls each API receives.
- Python load generator – repeatedly calls the APIs to produce traffic.
The layout mirrors the application used in the Docker course with the addition of the load generator and a lightweight database schema for recording requests.
The UI displays the output from both APIs, the timestamp returned from the database, and a count of total requests processed by each service.
While this course focuses on Kubernetes—not application development—you can run the services locally using Task. The provided Taskfile contains targets to start Postgres in a container, launch the APIs, run the React frontend, and execute the load generator. We'll briefly review the code so you know how the pieces fit together before deploying everything to our cluster.