Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) + Practice Exam

Trace the evolution from bare metal to containers and discover how container orchestration solves efficiency, agility, and scalability with popular runtimes like Docker and containerd.

Explore the features and capabilities of Kubernetes to orchestrate containers with high availability and self-healing, health checks, auto scaling, zero-downtime upgrades, and resource management.

Explore native, enterprise, and managed Kubernetes setups, including OpenShift, Rancher, Tanzu, Rakuten Cloud, EKS, AKS, and GKE. Compare control plane, security, networking, monitoring, and costs to choose the right option.

Initialize a two-node Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm on aws ec2 with master and worker nodes, Kubernetes 1.3, and configure security groups, ports, and Calico networking with cri-o.

Install a two-node Kubernetes cluster and prepare to explore various Kubernetes objects in the upcoming section.

Demonstrates kubectl namespace operations, including listing, creating, describing, switching contexts, and deleting namespaces to isolate resources and improve clarity and security.

Learn how pods are the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes, housing one or more containers that share network, storage, and a node, with a lifecycle from creation to termination.

Understand how deployments provide declarative updates, manage rollouts, and scale applications with strategies like rolling updates and rollbacks, delivering near zero downtime.

Demonstrates deploying a Mydb deployment with nginx:latest and three replicas, scaling to five, and verifying deployment, replica set, and pod status while illustrating self-healing and eventual deletion.

Learn how labels and selectors organize and target Kubernetes resources, using key value pairs to classify pods, deployments, and services, and match expressions to automate scaling and service exposure.

Explore labels and selectors in Kubernetes by creating a deployment with three nginx replicas, then verify deployments, replica sets, and pods and review the yaml for label and selector usage.

Explore the cluster IP service type, the default in Kubernetes, enabling internal pod communication via IP or DNS hostnames while restricting access to inside the cluster.

Demonstrates creating a deployment with nginx, exposing it as a cluster IP service, verifying endpoints, and testing access from a BusyBox pod to ensure internal service discovery.

Create a deployment named mid-depth using the nginx latest image, expose it as a node port service, and access it via the node IP and 31552.

Explore Kubernetes networking by examining service types like cluster IP, nodeport, and load balancer, along with their configurations and use cases, plus troubleshooting deployments and services.

Discover how daemonsets run pods on every node, enable automatic updates, and support node affinity and scalability while also covering jobs, cron jobs, static pods, and configmaps and secrets.

Explore how Kubernetes jobs manage batch processing with finite execution, pod management, parallelism, and completion tracking. Learn simple and parallel job types and use cases like data processing and migrations.

Learn to create a cron job in Kubernetes with kubectl, using a dry-run YAML, and inspect jobs, pods, and logs to verify execution.

Demonstrates creating and managing static pods with the kubelet, using the static pod manifest directory to run core components and observe automatic pod recreation.

Store configuration in key-value pairs with configmaps in Kubernetes, enabling decoupled configurations, dynamic updates, and data sources like literals, files, and environment variables consumed via volume mounts or environment variables.

Explore how daemonsets run pods on every node, manage one-time tasks with jobs and cron jobs, use static pods for node-level configurations, and secure data with configmaps and secrets.

Explore taints and tolerations in Kubernetes to control pod scheduling on nodes, including how taints repel pods, tolerations permit scheduling, and effects: no schedule, prefer no schedule, and no execute.

Understand how pod disruption budgets (PDBs) ensure high availability in Kubernetes during voluntary and involuntary disruptions, while noting that deleting deployments or pods can bypass PDBs.

Demonstrates creating and mounting an empty dir ephemeral volume in Kubernetes, with pod-level volume creation and container mounting to a path like /data.

Demonstrates using a hostpath volume to persist data on a worker node by mounting /data into a pod, with a node selector targeting a production node.

Provision shared NFS storage for a kubernetes cluster using persistent volumes and persistent volume claims, ensuring data persists across pod rescheduling and node changes.

Compare Kubernetes deployment and statefulset to understand stateless versus stateful applications. Contrast pod creation and termination patterns for deployment and statefulset, with stable naming and dedicated volumes.

Demonstrates an all deny network policy that blocks all traffic between pods in the default namespace, using net poll and policy types ingress and egress in a yaml file.