K8s Learn by Doing

52 hands-on Kubernetes labs. From your first Deployment to Istio, Knative, Traefik, and production architectures.

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Quick Start

# Check prerequisites
task prereqs

# Start cluster
task cluster:start

# Deploy any demo by number
task demo -- simple-app

# Check status
task status -- simple-app

# Clean up
task clean -- simple-app

Or without Taskfile:

# Start cluster
minikube start --cpus=4 --memory=8192 --disk-size=40g
minikube addons enable ingress && minikube addons enable metrics-server

# Deploy a demo
kubectl apply -f demos/simple-app/manifests/namespace.yaml
kubectl apply -f demos/simple-app/manifests/

# Check status
kubectl get pods -n simple-app

# Clean up
kubectl delete namespace simple-app

See docs/getting-started.md for detailed setup and the cheat sheet for common kubectl commands.

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Demos

Packaging & Deployment

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
01	Simple App	Deployments, Services, resource limits		Beginner	~5 min
02	Helm	Chart structure, templating, rollbacks	deep-dive	Beginner	~10 min
03	Kustomize	Base + overlay pattern, multi-env configs	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min
04	ArgoCD	GitOps, auto-sync, self-heal, App-of-Apps	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
30	Tekton Basics	Tasks, Pipelines, params, workspaces, results	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
31	Tekton CI/CD	Test, build, deploy pipeline with triggers	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min

Infrastructure & Tooling

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
05	Cert-Manager	TLS automation, trust chains, auto-provisioning	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
06	Redis	Cache-aside pattern, TTL, LRU, live dashboard	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
07	YAKD	Lightweight read-only cluster dashboard		Beginner	~5 min
08	Headlamp	Full-featured K8s UI with RBAC and exec		Beginner	~10 min

Workload Types

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
09	CloudNativePG	Operator-managed PostgreSQL, HA, failover	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
10	StatefulSet	Stable identity, per-pod PVCs, init containers	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
11	Jobs & CronJobs	Batch processing, parallel jobs, schedules	deep-dive	Beginner	~10 min
12	DaemonSet	One pod per node, tolerations, host access	deep-dive	Beginner	~10 min
26	Multi-Container	Sidecar, adapter, ambassador patterns	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min

Networking & Services

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
16	Service Types	ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, Headless	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
19	Network Policies	Zero-trust networking, deny-all, allow rules	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min

Configuration & Reliability

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
17	ConfigMaps & Secrets	Env vars, volume mounts, immutable configs	deep-dive	Beginner	~10 min
18	Probes & Lifecycle	Health checks, graceful shutdown, preStop hooks	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
21	Pod Disruption Budgets	Availability during maintenance	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min
23	Deployment Strategies	Rolling, blue/green, canary patterns	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min

Scaling & Resource Management

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
13	HPA	Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, CPU-based scaling	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
20	Resource Quotas	ResourceQuota, LimitRange, namespace governance	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min

Security & Access Control

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
14	RBAC	ServiceAccounts, Roles, RoleBindings	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min
24	Pod Security	SecurityContext, Pod Security Standards	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min
28	Vault	Secret management, policies, K8s auth	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
29	External Secrets	ESO syncs Vault into K8s Secrets	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min

Observability & Debugging

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
22	Prometheus & Grafana	Monitoring stack, PromQL, dashboards, alerts	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
25	kubectl Debug	Ephemeral containers, CrashLoop debugging	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min

Extensibility

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
15	CRDs & Operators	Custom resources, reconciliation, operator pattern	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min

Storage

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
27	PersistentVolumes	PVs, PVCs, StorageClasses, dynamic provisioning	deep-dive	Intermediate	~10 min

Real-World Architectures

Note: These demos run multi-service stacks and need more resources. Clean up other demos first (task clean:all) and allocate at least 6 CPUs / 12GB RAM to minikube.

#	Demo	What You Build	Deep Dive	Level	Time
32	Microservices Platform	Frontend + API + Worker + Redis + PostgreSQL	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
33	API Gateway (Kong)	Rate limiting, API key auth, load balancing	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
34	Event-Driven (Kafka)	Async messaging with producers and consumers	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min
35	EFK Logging	Fluent Bit + Elasticsearch + Kibana	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
36	ML Model Serving	Prediction API with auto-scaling under load	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
37	GitOps Full Loop	Tekton CI + ArgoCD CD, end-to-end	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min
38	Multi-Tenant Platform	3 teams, RBAC + Quotas + NetworkPolicies	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
39	Chaos Engineering	Break things, watch K8s self-heal	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
40	Progressive Delivery	Argo Rollouts canary with auto-rollback	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min

Advanced Tools

#	Demo	What You Learn	Deep Dive	Level	Time
41	Istio Service Mesh	mTLS, traffic splitting, observability	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min
42	Kyverno	Policy enforcement, validation, mutation	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
43	Velero	Backup, restore, disaster recovery	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
44	Sealed Secrets	GitOps-safe encrypted secrets	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
45	VPA	Auto right-sizing resource requests	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
46	Advanced Ingress & Routing	Gateway API, Traefik, HTTPRoute, middleware	deep-dive	Advanced	~30 min
47	Reloader	Auto-restart pods on ConfigMap/Secret changes	deep-dive	Beginner	~10 min
48	Knative Serving	Scale-to-zero, revisions, traffic splitting	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min
49	Trivy Operator	Container vulnerability scanning, CVE detection	deep-dive	Intermediate	~15 min
50	Falco	Runtime threat detection, eBPF syscall monitoring	deep-dive	Advanced	~20 min
51	OpenTelemetry & Tracing	Distributed tracing, Jaeger, spans, trace context	deep-dive	Intermediate	~20 min

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Architecture

graph LR
    subgraph "Your Machine"
        A[kubectl / Taskfile] --> B[Minikube]
    end
    subgraph "Minikube Cluster"
        B --> C[52 Labs]
        C --> D[Pods / Services / CRDs]
    end

Loading

Taskfile Commands

Command	Description
task prereqs	Check all prerequisites are installed
task cluster:start	Start minikube with recommended settings
task cluster:stop	Stop the cluster
task list	List all available demos
task demo -- redis	Deploy demo 06 (Redis)
task status -- redis	Check pod status for demo 06
task clean -- redis	Clean up demo 06
task clean:all	Clean up ALL demo namespaces
task validate	Run all linting and validation

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the demo template, style guide, and submission checklist.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

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