This class in one mile wide and one foot deep!

Welcome to DevOps projects using Kubernetes: a hands on guide. This class is an intermediate to advanced level one. I designed it for anyone who has some basic DevOps and cloud (AWS) experience but they need hands on labs to practice what they have learned.

Get ready to take your Kubernetes, AWS, and DevOps knowledge and experience to the next level by exploring how real world companies use these technolgies.

In this class, you will find very little theory and very much hands-on. It is important to understand how this course is designed before making the decision to enroll in it. For example, you will find many practical use cases for Helm. But you will not find a reference to all Helm commands. I assume you already have some experience with that. I also assume that you have some Kubernetes and AWS knowledge so topics like StatefulSets, Deployments, Pods, and IAM roles, EC2 instances, and S3 buckets will not be explained from scratch.

Having said that, let us explore what this class covers:

• More than one way to deploy Kubernetes on AWS. Although most companies choose the easy option which is using EKS for deploying Kubernetes, there are other ways available like kops. If you do not want to use a tool, you can even do it the hard way using kubeadm. We will see how we can semi-automate the process using Terraform and Packer.

• When it comes to app provisioning in Kubernetes, the list goes long. In section 2, we explore the most well-known app provisioning tools. We start with Kustomize, then we move to Helm. Finally, we dive into the most sophisticated (yet, most powerful) way of Kubernetes app provisioning: using operators. We will learn about Kudo, which takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

• For the rest of the class, we could not just continue with a Hello-World type of application. We needed something more complex yet easy to digest. So, we developed an application specifically for this class called “The Weather app”. It is a microservices application that consists of three components. Written in Go, JavaScript, and Python, The Weather App will help you understand the DevOps concepts laid out in the rest of the course.

• In the CI/CD part of this class, we explore Gitlab, which is one of the most prominent tools out there. We create a simple CI pipeline then we gradually make it more complex by introducing continuous delivery and deployment. 

• Finally, we explain how we can establish disaster recovery and data protection using EBS volume snapshots as well as using a third-party tool called Velero.

I hope you will enjoy watching this class and doing the labs inside.