Advanced Kubernetes Management Masterclass

Deep dive into the Control Plane components (etcd, kube-scheduler) and fault tolerance.

• High Availability (HA) Control Plane setup and failure scenarios
• Managing etcd backups and cluster restoration
• Kube-scheduler advanced features and custom scheduling policies

Understanding how pods communicate and securing inter-service traffic.

• Comparison of CNI plugins (Flannel, Calico, Cilium)
• Implementing network segmentation with Kubernetes NetworkPolicy
• Advanced Ingress Controllers (NGINX, Traefik) and traffic routing

Managing databases and other stateful services in K8s.

• Deep dive into StatefulSets, Headless Services, and ordered deployments
• Storage concepts: Persistent Volumes (PVs), PVCs, and StorageClasses (CSI drivers)
• Running a distributed database (e.g., MongoDB, PostgreSQL) using StatefulSets

Controlling where and how pods run to ensure performance and cost efficiency.

• Taints and Tolerations for dedicated nodes
• Node Selectors and Node Affinity/Anti-Affinity for granular placement
• Setting resource requests, limits, and Quality of Service (QoS) classes

Implementing the principle of least privilege in the cluster.

• Understanding ClusterRoles, Roles, and Bindings
• Configuring Service Accounts and their permissions
• Securing API access and external authentication methods (OIDC)

Protecting sensitive data and enforcing custom security policies.

• Using external Secret Stores (Vault, Cloud KMS) with K8s
• Introduction to Admission Controllers (Mutating and Validating)
• Implementing Pod Security Admission (PSA) and security best practices

Centralized control over service communication, security, and traffic.

• Istio Architecture: Control Plane (Pilot, Citadel) and Data Plane (Envoy Proxies)
• Automatic mTLS (mutual TLS) for all service-to-service communication
• Implementing traffic routing rules, retries, and circuit breakers

Using the Service Mesh for canary rollouts and debugging distributed systems.

• Implementing Canary and A/B traffic shifting using Istio VirtualServices
• Request tracing and integration with distributed tracing tools (Jaeger/Zipkin)
• Service Mesh performance monitoring (Kiali dashboard)

Optimizing cluster resource usage and responsiveness to traffic changes.

• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) based on custom metrics
• Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) for resource request recommendations
• Implementing the Cluster Autoscaler on major cloud providers

Extending Kubernetes' native functionality for specialized tasks.

• Defining and managing custom resources (CRs) using YAML
• Introduction to the Operator pattern (Controller logic)
• Using the Operator SDK for building production operators (conceptual)

Automating Continuous Deployment by integrating Git repositories as the single source of truth.

• GitOps principles and comparison with traditional CD
• Setting up ArgoCD or Flux for declarative application deployment
• Managing multi-cluster and multi-environment deployments via Git

Building the foundational infrastructure and GitOps pipeline for a complex application.

• Provisioning a Managed K8s Cluster (EKS/AKS/GKE)
• Installing Istio Service Mesh and configuring Ingress Gateway
• Deploying ArgoCD/Flux and integrating it with the application repository

Implementing advanced features, security, and the complete observability stack.

• Enforcing RBAC policies for different developer teams and namespaces
• Setting up HPA and Cluster Autoscaler for dynamic scaling
• Deploying Prometheus and Grafana for full cluster monitoring and alerting