Kubernetes – Made by Mikal

Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: online training

There are a few online training resources I’ve had a play with while learning Kubernetes, so I figure that’s worth a quick write up. This is a follow on from my post about Kubernetes podcasts I’ve tried. I’ve tried three training providers so far:

The Linux Foundation Kubernetes course (LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals) is probably the “go to” resource for many people, and is often sold bundled with the certification exams. Unfortunately, it is really terrible. It is by far the worst course I’ve seen so far.
On the other hand, the Linux Academy Kubernetes course is really good. It is flaw is that you have to sign up to Linux Academy, which provides you with all you can eat courses for a rather steep annual fee.
Finally, I discovered Mumshad Mannambeth’s Udemy courses, and frankly they’re excellent. He’s put a huge amount of effort into them and it really shows. Even better, with Udemy’s regular sales you can pick up his three Kubernetes courses (intro, admin certification, and developer certification) for under $50 AUD. There are even plenty of online quizzes.

If I was going to pick a course to try, I’d definitely go with Mumshad.

Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: podcasts

It has become clear to me that it is time to care about Kubernetes more. I’m sure many people have cared for ages, but the things I want to build at the moment are starting to be more container based now that I am thinking more at the application layer than the cloud infrastructure layer. So how to do that? I thought I’d write down some notes on what has worked (or not) for me, in the hope it will help others. In this post, podcasts.

I thought podcasts would be an interesting way to get started with some nice overviews. This is especially true because I’m already a pretty heavy podcast user, so it was easy to slot into my existing routine. Unfortunately this hasn’t really worked out. I started with the podctl podcast, but they only ever talk about Red Hat stuff. It is very rare for a guest to not be a Red Hat employee for example. The presenters of this podcast seem to also really dislike OpenStack for reasons they never explain, which is annoying.

Then I figured maybe the Google Kubernetes podcast would be better, but it often lacks the depth I am interested in.

I am yet to find a good podcast which deep dives into technology instead of just talking about what is in the latest release. So maybe these podcasts are useful if you’re interested in what things dropped in the most recent release, but they’re not a good nor systematic way to get introduced to Kubernetes.

That said, I only just discovered the TGI Kubernetes youtube channel yesterday. It is not really what I wanted in a podcast given its a video blog, but I think it has prospects to be interesting. I will update this post when I’ve had a chance to check it out in more depth.

Have you found a good Kubernetes podcast? Am I being wildly unfair?

Kubernetes Fundamentals: Setting up nginx ingress

I’m doing the Linux Foundation Kubernetes Fundamentals course at the moment, and I was very disappointed in the chapter on Ingress Controllers. To be honest it feels like an after thought — there is no lab, and the provided examples don’t work if you re-type them into Kubernetes (you can’t cut and paste of course, just to add to the fun).

I found this super annoying, so I thought I’d write up my own notes on how to get nginx working as an Ingress Controller on Kubernetes.

Continue reading “Kubernetes Fundamentals: Setting up nginx ingress”