DevOps Automation with Kubernetes

Who is it for

This training is designed for cross-functional product team members, looking to automate their software build and deployment activities:

• Software developers
• DevOps or Site Reliability Engineers
• Software Architects

This comprehensive training covers application containers and Kubernetes from beginner to advanced levels. It's designed for individuals with little to no prior experience or a basic understanding of these technologies who want to learn how to build, deploy, and orchestrate applications. Starting with foundational concepts for running applications on Kubernetes, the course progresses to advanced topics, teaching you how to leverage Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GitOps to automate application delivery and significantly improve software development processes.

Agenda

This training provides a foundational understanding of application containers and best practices for building them, followed by practical guidance on deploying them to Kubernetes.

You'll then explore automation, learning to implement CI/CD pipelines for building and deploying to Kubernetes environments. Discover how to use GitOps for reproducible outcomes and observability, leveraging modern tools to establish Kubernetes as a powerful development and delivery platform.

Containers

• What is an application container
• Building application containers
• Running software with application containers
• Distribute containers with a registry

Kubernetes

• Pod - the compute unit of Kubernetes
• Deployment - run an application
• StatefulSet - run a stateful application
• Services - connect the workloads
• Ingress - expose the application
• Volume, Configmap and Secret - add data and configuration to your container
• Liveness and Readiness - self-healing and high availability
• Limit and Request - control resource consumption
• Job and CronJob - scheduled workloads
• Custom Resource Definition - extend the Kubernetes API
• Init Container
• Helm - package the Kubernetes resources

Local Development environment.

• Build containers - improve caching
• Check containers for best practices and vulnerabilities.
• Upload container images to the registry.
• Create a Helm chart and run the application locally with “scaffold”.
• Helm chart versioning and best practices

Deploy applications using a pipeline.

• Check, build and upload the application automatically.
• Deploy the application in Kubernetes - discover potential issues.
• Use Ingress to expose applications to the world and optimize pipelines.
• Store the values file in the Git repository and version it.
• Use ArgoCD to promote the application to multiple environments and improve developer feedback mechanisms.
• Secrets management - implement unified experience regardless whether it is production or local development.

Improve observability and availability.

• Make the application logs available to Grafana.
• Expose the business metrics to Prometheus and create Grafana dashboards.
• Onboard a new application.
• Use Istio service mesh and distribute Kubernetes manifest responsibilities.
• Make stateful services highly available using Operators or Managed Services.

Simplify and prevent repetitive work.

• Platform patterns - Helm library charts and improved application onboarding.
• Use our own custom resources to manage multiple resources.
• Take advantage of ArgoCD ApplicationSets.

Tools used in hands-on labs

Docker, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitLab, Harbor, Scaffold, External Secrets, Ingress Controller, Redis, MariaDB Operator, Istio, Kiali, External DNS, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, Kind.