Seven decks, one continuous path from zero to hero.

You are here: Deck 1. Each deck ends with its own 15-question quiz.

You are here

1 · Foundations

Architecture, control plane, scheduling, workloads, networking, storage.

Managed

2 · GKE deep dive

Autopilot vs Standard, release channels, VPC-native, Workload Identity, Gateway.

Managed

3 · EKS deep dive

Node groups, Karpenter, Pod Identity, VPC CNI, Auto Mode, upgrades.

Self-managed

4 · On-prem, AKS, troubleshooting

kubeadm, Rancher, k3s, Talos, MetalLB, plus the diagnostic trees.

Hardening

5 · Security and multi-tenancy

RBAC, PSS, supply chain, Falco, Capsule, vCluster, isolation.

Operate

6 · Scale, cost, lifecycle

HPA/VPA/KEDA, capacity, upgrades, Velero backup and DR.

Extend

7 · Networking and extensibility

Mesh, Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, operators, GPU and LLM serving.

Deck 1 gives you the vocabulary every later deck builds on.

Seven decks, one continuous path

The path is ordered so that each deck depends only on earlier ones. Foundations teaches how a cluster works in the abstract. The two cloud decks (GKE, EKS) then show how a managed provider changes who owns what and which provider-specific features matter in production. Deck 4 covers the clusters you build yourself, including Rancher-managed fleets, and the systematic troubleshooting skills that apply everywhere.

Decks 5 to 7 are cross-cutting disciplines: security and tenancy, scaling and lifecycle, and advanced networking plus extensibility. They reuse the objects introduced here, so the better you internalise Deck 1, the faster they go.

Within this deck the eight modules are: why Kubernetes, core objects, control plane, worker nodes, scheduling, workloads, networking, storage, then a real-world synthesis and the quiz.