Platform Engineering Basics

Learning Objectives

• Understand why Kubernetes is an efficient platform to build platforms: Find common patterns around Kubernetes APIs and understand Operators
• Describe GitOps principles and apply them to your projects: Use reconciliation-based deployment patterns
• Use ecosystem tools to enhance your level of infrastructure automation: Automate DNS management and certificate issuance, and securely handle secrets

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of Kubernetes
• First steps with Templating (Helm)
• Experience with version control (Git)
• Knowledge about DNS and TLS

What You Will Learn

• Install and Use Kubernetes Operators: Understand the operation mode of Operators and what they do
• GitOps with ArgoCD: Use Applications and ApplicationSets to deploy your applications
• Manage Secrets with External Secrets: Learn to securely check in secrets
• Automation of Certificate Issuance with cert-manager: Create Let's Encrypt certificates, even in your private environment
• Basic Observability with the kube-prom-stack: Install a simple observability stack
• Provide Databases using CloudNativePG: Install your database with an operator and attach it to an application

Who Is This For

• know about Kubernetes and want to add more capabilities to it
• plan to build a platform on top of Kubernetes
• are curious about GitOps and want to use it
• want to automate operational tasks

As this course covers a broad range of topics, this is interesting for people who want to get a good overview of technologies and projects which support platform building. It is the follow-up course to the Kubernetes Fundamentals course.