Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam Prep

Description

This class will prepare you for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam. You will acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities to design, implement, and maintain a Kubernetes cluster.

This course covers all objectives and concepts necessary for passing the CKA exam which includes:

• Cluster architecture, installation, and configuration
• Rolling out and rolling back applications in production
• Scaling clusters and applications to best use
• How to create robust, self-healing deployments
  

You will be provided the components necessary to assemble your own high availability (HA) Kubernetes environment and configure, expand, and control it to meet the demands made of cluster administrators. At the end of a week-long, intensive training you will take a mock CKA exam that simulates the real exam.

Audience

• Professionals who need to maintain or set up a Kubernetes cluster
• Container Orchestration Engineers
• DevOps Professionals
• Anyone seeking the CKA certification
  

Learning Objectives

• Cluster architecture, installation, and configuration
• Rolling out and rolling back applications in production
• Scaling clusters and applications to best use
• How to create robust, self healing deployments
• Networking configuration on cluster nodes, services, and CoreDNS
• Persistent and intelligent storage for applications
• Troubleshooting cluster, application, and user errors
• Vendor-agnostic cloud provider-based Kubernetes
• AI LLM prompt engineering for generating configuration snippets and solutions

Course Outline

1: Cluster Architecture

• Kubernetes Architecture
• Pods and the Control Plane

2: Installation

• Kubeadm Prerequisites
• Configure Network Plugin Requirements
• Kubeadm Basic Cluster
• Join Node to Cluster
• Hands-on Labs
  • Kubeadm Prerequisites
  • Configure Network Plugin Requirements
  • Installing Kubeadm
  • Join Node to Cluster

3: Cluster Administration

• ETCD Snapshot and Restore
• Kubeadm Cluster Upgrade
• Purge Kubeadm
• Kubernetes the Alta3 Way
• Hands-on Labs
  • ETCD Snapshot and Restore
  • Kubeadm cluster upgrade
  • Purge Kubeadm
  • Deploy Kubernetes using Ansible

4: Containers

• Container Essentials
• Hands-on Labs
  • Creating a Docker Image

5: Pod Basics

• YAML
• Manifests
• Namespaces
• API Versioning and Deprecations
• Hands-on Labs
  • Basic Pods
  • Namespaces

6: Kubectl

• Kubectl get and sorting
• Hands-on Labs
  • kubectl get

7: Resource Management

• Limits, Requests, and Namespace ResourceQuotas
• Admission Controller
• Hands-on Labs
  • Kubectl Top and Application Monitoring
  • Resource Requests and Limits
  • Namespace Resource Quota
  • Create a LimitRange AdmissionController

8: User Administration

• Contexts
• Role-Based Access Control
• Hands-on Labs
  • Contexts
  • Role-Based Access Control
  • RBAC Distributing Access

9: Advanced Pod Design

• Readiness and Liveness Probes
• ConfigMaps and Volume Mounting
• Hands-on Labs
  • Implement Probes and Health Checks
  • Persistent Configuration with ConfigMaps

10: Lecture: Secrets

• Multi-Container Pods
• Init Containers
• Taints, Tolerations, and Pod Affinity
• Hands-on Labs
  • Create and Consume Secrets
  • Creating Ephemeral Storage For Fluentd Logging Sidecar
  • Understand the Init Container Multi-Container Pod Design Pattern
  • Tainted Nodes and Tolerations

11: Logging

• Logging with kubectl log
• Advanced Logging Techniques
• Hands-on Labs
  • Utilize Container Logs

12: Labels

• Labels
• Annotations
• Hands-on Labs
  • Labels and Selectors
  • Insert an Annotation

13: Replica and Daemon Sets

• ReplicaSets
• DaemonSets
• Hands-on Labs
  • Create and Configure a ReplicaSet

14: Deployments

• Deployments - Purpose and Advantages
• Deployments - Version Control
• Blue/Green and Canary Deployment Strategies
• Deployments - Horizontal Scaling
• Challenge: Horizontal Pod Autoscaling
• Hands-on Labs
  • Writing a Deployment Manifest
  • Performing Rolling Updates and Rollbacks with Deployments
  • Advanced Deployment Strategies

15: Persistent Storage

• Persistent Volumes, Claims, and StorageClasses
• PVC, PV, and StorageClass config
• Hands-on Labs
  • Using PersistentVolumeClaims for Storage
  • Persistent Storage with NFS

16: Services & Networking

• NetworkPolicy
• Services - LoadBalancer, NodePort, and ClusterIP
• Networking Plugins
• Ingress Controllers
• Hands-on Labs
  • Deploy a NetworkPolicy
  • Namespace Network Policy
  • Access to applications via services
  • Ingress Controllers Expose a Service

17: DNS

• Hostnames and FQDNs
• CoreDNS
• Configure CoreDNS
• Hands-on Labs
  • Hostnames and FQDNs
  • Install CoreDNS
  • Configure CoreDNS
  • Revert CoreDNS to KubeDNS