#_ Getting Started with: Kubernetes

# Notes and concepts _

1. Kubernetes Basics:

● Pods: Smallest deployable units in Kubernetes that can hold one or

multiple containers.
● Nodes: Worker machines in Kubernetes.
● Clusters: A set of worker machines, called nodes, that run
containerized applications.
● Kubectl: Command-line tool for interacting with a Kubernetes
cluster.
● Kubelet: An agent running on each node in the cluster.
● API Server: Front-end to the cluster's control plane.
● Etcd: Consistent and highly-available key-value store used as
Kubernetes' backing store for all cluster data.
● Control Plane: The collection of processes that control Kubernetes
nodes.
● Namespace: Virtual clusters backed by the same physical cluster.

2. Workloads & Controllers:

● Deployments: Manages a replicated application.

● ReplicaSets: Ensures that a specified number of replicas of a Pod
are running at all times.
● StatefulSets: Manages the deployment and scaling of a set of Pods,
providing guarantees about ordering and uniqueness.
● DaemonSets: Ensures that all (or some) nodes run a copy of a Pod.
● Jobs: Creates one or more Pods and ensures that a specified number
of them successfully terminate.
● CronJobs: Manages time-based Jobs, such as running a Job at a
specific time or periodic intervals.
● Horizontal Pod Autoscaler: Automatically scales the number of Pods
in a deployment, replica set, or replication controller based on
observed CPU or memory usage.

By: Waleed Mousa

3. Services & Networking:

● Services: A way to expose an application running in Pods as a

network service.
● Ingress: Manages external access to services within a cluster.
● Network Policies: Define how Pods communicate with each other.
● Service Discovery: Mechanism to connect to services dynamically
based on a logical name.
● Load Balancer: A service that distributes network traffic across
multiple Pods.

4. Configuration & Secrets:

● ConfigMaps: Manage configuration data separately from container

images.
● Secrets: Manages sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth
tokens, and ssh keys.
● Environment Variables: Used within Kubernetes for service
discovery.
● Volumes: Persistent storage in Kubernetes.
● Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs): Request for storage by a user.

5. Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging:

● Kube-state-metrics: A simple service that listens to the

Kubernetes API server and generates metrics about the state of the
objects.
● Prometheus: An open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit.
● Grafana: Open platform for beautiful analytics and monitoring
(often used with Prometheus).
● ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana used for logging in
Kubernetes.
● Kubernetes Dashboard: General-purpose web UI for Kubernetes
clusters.
● Kubectl Debug: Tool for debugging pods.
● Heapster: Collects monitoring and performance metrics.

By: Waleed Mousa

6. Security & Authorization:

● Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Access control system.

● Security Policies: Security constraints applied to a Pod.
● Service Account: Identity attached to Pods to interact with the
Kubernetes API Server.
● Transport Layer Security (TLS): Protocol for privacy and data
integrity.

7. Kubernetes Storage:

● Persistent Volumes (PVs): Offers storage to the cluster that is

independent of Pod life cycles.
● Storage Classes: Allow administrators to describe the "classes" of
storage offered.

8. Kubernetes Cluster Maintenance:

● Node Maintenance: Taking a node down for service or replacing a

failing node.
● Cluster Upgrades: Upgrading the cluster to a newer version.
● Backup and Disaster Recovery: Ensuring data continuity and
integrity.

9. Extending Kubernetes:

● Custom Resources: Extension of the Kubernetes API.

● API Server Extension: Custom endpoints in the Kubernetes API.
● Custom Controllers: Automate handling of Custom Resources.
● Operators: Application-specific controllers to create, configure,
and manage instances of complex stateful applications.

10. Advanced Features:

● Service Mesh (e.g., Istio): Manage microservices in a transparent

way.
● Pod Priority & Preemption: Specifies priorities for Pods and allows
preemption of lower-priority Pods.
● Taints and Tolerations: Allows a node to repel a set of Pods.

By: Waleed Mousa

 ● Node Affinity: Controls where a Pod runs based on labels on nodes
and conditions called node affinity rules.
● Pod Presets: Injects information like secrets, volume mounts, and
environment variables into pods at creation time.

11. Kubernetes Cloud Integration:

● Amazon EKS: Managed Kubernetes service on AWS.

● Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Managed Kubernetes service on
Google Cloud.
● Azure AKS: Managed Kubernetes service on Azure.

12. Continuous Deployment/Integration in Kubernetes:

● Jenkins: Popular open-source tool to perform continuous

integration and build automation.
● GitLab CI: Continuous integration service included with GitLab
that builds and tests the software whenever a developer pushes
code to the application.
● Spinnaker: Open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform
for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

13. Helm: Kubernetes Package Manager:

● Helm Charts: Packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources.

● Helm Repository: A collection of charts for Kubernetes packages.

14. Kubernetes Custom Scheduling:

● Custom Scheduler: You can implement a custom scheduler to have

more control over the scheduling of your Pods.

15. Kubernetes Federation:

● Cluster Federation: Allows the synchronization of resources across

multiple clusters.

By: Waleed Mousa

16. Windows in Kubernetes:

● Windows Nodes: Support for Windows worker nodes and Windows

containers in Kubernetes.

17. Kubernetes Testing:

● Kubetest: Kubernetes end-to-end testing.

18. Kubernetes Add-ons:

● DNS: DNS server for service name resolution.

● Web UI (Dashboard): Web-based Kubernetes user interface.
● Container Resource Monitoring: Time-series monitoring of resource
utilization.
● Cluster-level Logging: Save container logs to a logging backend.

19. Other Essential Concepts:

● Quotas: Constraints applied to resources like Pods, Persistent

Volumes.
● Annotations: Attach arbitrary non-identifying metadata to objects.
● Labels and Selectors: Labels are key/value pairs attached to
objects and selectors are used to select objects based on labels.
● Liveness and Readiness Probes: Health checks for running
applications.

20. Kubernetes Failure Handling:

● Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs): Provides constraints that limit

voluntary disruptions for Pods.

21. Kubernetes Architecture Concepts:

● Cloud Controller Manager: Embeds cloud-specific control logic for

the cloud provider.
● Kube-Proxy: Maintains network rules and enables connection
forwarding.
● Container Runtime: The software used to run containers, e.g.,
Docker, containerd.

By: Waleed Mousa

22. Kubernetes Community and Development:

● Special Interest Groups (SIGs): The Kubernetes project is divided

into several Special Interest Groups or SIGs.
● Contributing to Kubernetes: Guide to becoming an active
contributor to the Kubernetes project.

23. Kubernetes Best Practices:

● Logging Best Practices: Guidelines for logging in Kubernetes.

● Monitoring Best Practices: Guidelines for monitoring in
Kubernetes.
● Security Best Practices: Guidelines for securing your applications
in Kubernetes.
● Performance Best Practices: Guidelines for ensuring optimal
performance in Kubernetes.

24. Kubernetes Automation and Autoscaling:

● Cluster Autoscaler: Automatically adjusts the size of the cluster,

scaling it up or down as necessary.
● Vertical Pod Autoscaler: Automatically adjusts the amount of CPU
and memory requested by containers in a Pod.
● Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA): Automatically scales the number
of Pods in a deployment or replica set based on observed CPU or
memory utilization.

25. Kubernetes Development Tools:

● Minikube: Runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on

your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop
with it day-to-day.
● Skaffold: Command line tool that facilitates continuous
development for Kubernetes applications.
● Kompose: Conversion tool for all Docker Compose users to help them
move to Kubernetes.
● Kubeadm: Tool for bootstrapping a best-practice Kubernetes
cluster.

By: Waleed Mousa

26. Advanced Kubernetes Networking:

● Network Plugins: Extend Kubernetes networking.

● CNI (Container Network Interface): Standard for writing plugins to
configure network interfaces in Linux containers.
● Flannel: Overlay network provider.
● Calico: Provides secure network connectivity.

27. Kubernetes Performance Tuning:

● Kubelet Garbage Collection: Cleanup of unused images or

containers.
● Kernel Tuning: Adjusting Linux kernel parameters to optimize
performance.

28. Kubernetes Service Mesh:

● Istio: Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices.

● Linkerd: Another popular service mesh for Kubernetes.

29. Kubernetes Mobile Integration:

● Kubernetes on Edge: Running Kubernetes in edge computing

environments.

30. Additional Kubernetes Ecosystem Tools:

● Cilium: Security and networking for cloud-native applications.

● Knative: Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage
modern serverless workloads.
● OpenFaas: Open-source Function as a Service (FaaS) platform built
on Kubernetes.
● Metacontroller: Creates custom controllers using simple JavaScript
(or other scripting languages).

By: Waleed Mousa

Kubernetes Commands & Usages:

1- Basic Cluster Information:

○ kubectl cluster-info: Display information about the cluster.

○ kubectl version: Display version info.

2- Working with Nodes and Cluster:

○ kubectl get nodes: List nodes in a cluster.

○ kubectl describe node <node-name>: Show details of a specific
node.

3- Working with Pods:

○ kubectl get pods: List all pods in all namespaces.

○ kubectl run <name> --image=<image>: Deploy a new Pod with a
given image.
○ kubectl describe pod <pod-name>: Describe a specific pod.
○ kubectl logs <pod-name>: Fetch the logs from a pod.
○ kubectl delete pod <pod-name>: Delete a specific pod.

4- Working with Deployments:

○ kubectl create deployment <name> --image=<image>: Create a new

deployment.
○ kubectl get deployments: List all deployments.
○ kubectl describe deployment <deployment-name>: Describe a
specific deployment.
○ kubectl scale deployment <deployment-name> --replicas=<num>:
Scale up/down a deployment.

5- Working with Services:

○ kubectl expose deployment <name> --type=LoadBalancer

--port=8080: Expose a deployment as a service.
○ kubectl get services: List all services.
○ kubectl describe service <service-name>: Describe a specific
service.

By: Waleed Mousa

6- Config and Storage:

○ kubectl get configmaps: List all config maps.

○ kubectl create configmap <name> --from-file=<path>: Create a
config map from a file.
○ kubectl get secrets: List all secrets.
○ kubectl create secret: Create a secret.
○ kubectl get pv: List all persistent volumes.
○ kubectl get pvc: List all persistent volume claims.

7- Namespaces and Context:

○ kubectl get namespaces: List all namespaces.

○ kubectl config get-contexts: Show all contexts.
○ kubectl config use-context <context-name>: Switch to a
different context.

8- Others:

○ kubectl apply -f <filename>: Apply a configuration from a file.

○ kubectl delete -f <filename>: Delete resources defined in a
file.
○ kubectl exec -it <pod-name> -- /bin/sh: Execute a command
inside a running pod.
○ kubectl port-forward <pod-name> <local-port>:<pod-port>:
Forward a port from a running pod to a local port.

9- Advanced:

○ kubectl get all: List all resources.

○ kubectl rollout status deployment/<deployment-name>: View the
rollout status of a deployment.
○ kubectl rollout history deployment/<deployment-name>: View the
history of a deployment.
○ kubectl rollout undo deployment/<deployment-name>: Rollback to
a previous version of a deployment.

By: Waleed Mousa

10- Monitoring & Logging:

● kubectl top nodes: Display resource (CPU/Memory/Storage) usage of

nodes.
● kubectl top pods: Display resource (CPU/Memory/Storage) usage of
pods.

11- Autoscaling:

● kubectl autoscale deployment <deployment-name> --min=<min-pods>

--max=<max-pods> --cpu-percent=<cpu-util-percentage>: Auto scale a
deployment based on CPU utilization.

12- Working with Helm:

● helm list: List releases.

● helm install <chart>: Install a helm chart.
● helm uninstall <release-name>: Uninstall a helm release.

13- Using Network Policies:

● kubectl get networkpolicies: List all network policies.

● kubectl describe networkpolicy <policy-name>: Describe a specific
network policy.

14- Using CronJobs and Jobs:

● kubectl get cronjobs: List all cronjobs.

● kubectl get jobs: List all jobs.
● kubectl logs job/<job-name>: Fetch logs from a job.

15- Working with RBAC:

● kubectl get roles: List all roles in the current namespace.

● kubectl get clusterroles: List all cluster roles.

16- Using kubectl Plugins:

● kubectl krew search: Search plugins available for kubectl.

● kubectl krew install <plugin-name>: Install a kubectl plugin.

By: Waleed Mousa