Course Wrap Up (What's Next?)

Congratulations on making it to the end of the Kubernetes course! Below are some key areas you can explore to deepen your understanding and continue your journey.

Where to Go From Here

Advanced Networking

• Evaluate different CNI plugins and understand the trade-offs between them.
• Explore multi-cluster networking setups and how to optimize connectivity.
• Implement network policies to restrict traffic flow between services.
• Consider using a service mesh such as Istio or Linkerd to add features like mutual TLS, retries, and enhanced observability.

Workload Optimization

• Tune resource requests and limits based on real usage patterns.
• Tools like Goldilocks and KRR can help you right-size your workloads.
• Implement autoscaling using the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for pods and Cluster Autoscaler (or Karpenter) to adjust node capacity.

Scheduling and High Availability

• Use node affinities, taints, and tolerations to control where workloads run.
• Investigate custom schedulers if you have specialized placement requirements.

Disaster Recovery

• Ensure that your cluster state and application data can be restored in case of failure.
• Tools like Velero or Kasten K10 provide backup and recovery capabilities.
• When using GitOps, keep your manifests in version control so you can easily recreate your cluster.

Extending Kubernetes

• Building your own operators is a great way to automate custom workflows and extend the Kubernetes API.

Course Recap

Over the course we:

1. Built a foundation by exploring Kubernetes history, core concepts, and built‑in resource types.
2. Learned how to use Helm and deployed a sample application with supporting tooling.
3. Covered debugging techniques, multi-environment deployments, and automated pipelines using GitOps.

The full source code for the demos can be found in the devops-directive-kubernetes-course repository.

Thank you for following along. If you enjoyed the course, please consider sharing it with your network and join the discussion on Discord.

And remember: Just. Keep. Building. 🚀