The Best Kubernetes Tutorials

We have been looking for the best Kubernetes tutorials out there and thought of sharing some of what we found interesting to get started with Kubernetes. 

The Official Kubernetes.io Tutorials 

It is more of a collection of the existing content on Kubernetes.io. It focuses more on introducing the general concepts and constructs of Kubernetes. But it doesn’t provide necessary lessons that build upon each other. Covered Topics: 

• The Basics
• Configuring Kubernetes
• Stateless Applications
• Stateful Applications
• CI/CD Pipeline
• Managing Kubernetes Clusters
• Services 

DigitalOcean Tutorials

It is a collection of articles that are nicely written and well organized. They are sometimes focused on Running Kubernetes on top of DigitalOcean however. But you are still going to learn a lot of Kubernetes basics that are applicable to any other infrastructure. Some of the notable topics are:

• An Introduction to Kubernetes
• An introduction to Kubernetes DNS Services
• An introduction to Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes
• Modernizing Applications for Kubernetes
• Building Optimized Containers for Kubernetes
• Kubernetes Networking Under the Hood
• Architecting Applications for Kubernetes
• Building Blocks for Doing CI/CD with Kubernetes
• How to Back up and restore a Kubernetes Cluster on DigitalOcean using Heptio Ark
• How to Setup a Nginix Ingress with Cert-Manager on DigitalOcean Kubernetes
• How to Inspect Kubernetes Networking

Google Kubernetes Engine Tutorials

Google tutorials are mostly focused on specific use cases more than teaching you the basic Kubernetes concepts. Examples of such tutorials are: create a guestbook with Redis and PHP on GKE or Using Persistent Disks with WordPress and MySQL. Google depends mainly on Kubernetes.io as the main source of knowledge about Kubernetes since Google engineers are the most contributors to these tutorials. Main covered topics:

• Deploying Applications 
• Configuring cluster networking
• Continuous Integration and delivery
• GKE administration
• Accessing GCP Services

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Tutorials 

Microsoft Azure tutorials on AKS are heavily focused on Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes version. It is also limited compared to what’s out there. It is pretty much like a glorified hello world tutorial community taking you from deploying a simple application all the way to upgrading a cluster. If you are into getting things done using AKS more than learning about Kubernetes, I’d recommend you to go straight into these tutorials. Covered topics are:

• Prepare application for AKS
• Create container registry
• Create a Kubernetes Cluster
• Run application
• Scale application
• update application
• Upgrade cluster

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Tutorials

IBM cloud tutorials are fanatic about IBM Kubernetes Service. Although you will learn a lot about Kubernetes, it will be only the IBM way of running Kubernetes :) What I liked about these tutorials are the advanced use cases that you may need to look at, such as performance tuning or protecting sensitive information in your cluster. 

Another aspect that I think is unique to IBM is the focus on deploying applications of a vertical market on Kubernetes, such as applications for financial services, healthcare, and retail. 

Notable topics are:

• Use case specific applications tutorials, focusing on financial services, government, healthcare, retail, and transportation. 
• How to set up a proper cluster strategy 
• Basic Kubernetes Tutorials, such as setting up a new cluster, networking, multi-region clusters, etc.
• Cluster administration
• Managing cluster network traffic
• Deploying apps on clusters
• Deploying Serverless apps with Knative 

AWS EKS Guides and Tutorials

AWS is more fanatic about their managed Kubernetes :) They have decent tutorials but are heavily focused on EKS. I guess you wouldn’t a many of them because most of the Kubernetes deployments on AWS are self-managed by AWS customers. Notable tutorials are:

• Introducing Amazon EKS
• Deploy a Kubernetes Application with Amazon EKS
• Complete Amazon EKS Microservices Workshop
• Continuous Delivery with Amazon EKS and Jenkins X
• Securing Amazon EKS Using Lambda and Falco
• Git Push to Deploy Your App on EKS
• Deploy OpenFaaS on Amazon EKS
• Provision AWS Services Through Kubernetes Using the AWS Service Broker

Other Advanced Kubernetes Tutorials

• A Tour of the Kubernetes Source Code: From kubectl to API Server
• Level Triggering and Reconciliation in Kubernetes
• Zero-downtime Deployment in Kubernetes with Jenkins
• Dancing at the Lip of a Volcano: The Kubernetes Security Process — Explained
• How to move from single master to multi-master in an AWS kops Kubernetes cluster
• Kubernetes Cluster Federation (The Hard Way)
• Implementing Advanced Scheduling Techniques with Kubernetes
• Step by step guide to set up a multi-region Kubernetes app
• Extending Kubernetes: Create Controllers for Core and Custom Resources
• Udemy: Advanced Kubernetes Usage
• Kubernetes for dev infrastructure
• Dynamic Environments with Kubernetes
• How to Setup Scalable Jenkins on Top of a Kubernetes Cluster
• The best architecture with Docker and Kubernetes — myth or reality?

We collected those tutorials and links for you to get started with Kubernetes or if want to build a more resilient and efficient infrastructure using Kubernetes. The best out of all these tutorials are DigitalOcean tutorials. They are super organized, clean, and engaging. 

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