Kubernetes From The Ground Up

Most Kubernetes tutorials hand you a glossary of forty nouns and hope a mental model precipitates out. It doesn’t.

This series goes the other way: one load-bearing idea first — Kubernetes is a reconciliation loop — then the handful of concepts and commands that idea makes inevitable, and then we go break a real cluster and diagnose it blind. No answers handed over; just the three lenses (get → describe → logs) and a map of where failures live.

Each lab is its own page. Work them in order:

• Lab 0 · The Core 5 & 5 — the reconcile-loop mental model, the five concepts and five commands that carry their weight, and the pod-failure lifecycle map. The spine everything else builds on.
• Lab 1 · Failure Triage — force CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, Pending, and a CoreDNS outage; diagnose each blind. The status string tells you which stage failed; the stage tells you which lens holds the evidence.
• Lab 2 · Observability End-to-End — scrape a real app, learn the PromQL core, build a RED dashboard by hand, and trip an alert that fires on a simulated incident then resolves. A dashboard is a hospital vitals monitor pointed at a service.
• Lab 3 · SLOs & Error Budgets — define one, burn it in a simulated incident, read the burn-rate, and build the multi-window burn alert. Ship or freeze, decided by math not opinion.
• Lab 4 · GitOps with Argo CD — put the cluster under Git control; change by commit, watch it self-heal drift, roll back with one git revert. The Lab 0 reconcile loop, lifted one layer up.
• Lab 5 · Blast Radius — bad deploy → rollback; failing readiness probe; a deliberate OOMKill — with a five-line postmortem for each. Fail small, contained, reversible. (Series finale.)