Road map for Kubernetes

 Here’s a structured roadmap of Kubernetes topics you should master to ace interviews—grouped by area and level:

1. Core Concepts

  1. What Is Kubernetes & Why Use It

    • Container orchestration vs. plain containers

    • Key use-cases: self-healing, scaling, rolling updates

  2. Architecture Overview

    • Control plane (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager)

    • Worker nodes (kubelet, kube-proxy, container runtime)

2. Installation & Configuration

  1. Cluster Setup Options

    • kubeadm, kops, minikube, kind, managed services (EKS/GKE/AKS)

  2. Configuration Files

    • kubeconfig contexts and clusters

    • API objects in YAML/JSON manifests

3. Workloads & Scheduling

  1. Pods & ReplicaSets

    • Pod lifecycle, multi-container patterns, init containers

    • ReplicaSets vs. Deployments

  2. Deployments & Rollouts

    • Rolling updates, rollbacks, strategies (Recreate vs. RollingUpdate)

  3. DaemonSets, StatefulSets, Jobs & CronJobs

    • When to use each workload type

4. Services & Networking

  1. Service Types

    • ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, ExternalName

  2. In-Cluster Networking

    • CNI plugins (Calico, Flannel, Weave)

    • DNS (kube-dns/CoreDNS)

  3. Ingress & API Gateway

    • Ingress controllers, rules, TLS termination

5. Storage

  1. Volumes & Volume Types

    • emptyDir, hostPath, configMap/secret as volumes

    • PersistentVolume (PV) & PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC)

  2. Dynamic Provisioning & StorageClasses

    • CSI drivers, reclaim policies, access modes

6. Configuration & Secrets

  1. ConfigMap

    • Injecting configuration into pods as env vars or files

  2. Secret

    • Storing sensitive data, mounting as volume vs. env

7. Security

  1. Authentication & Authorization

    • ServiceAccount, RBAC (Roles, RoleBindings, ClusterRoles)

  2. Pod Security Policies / Admission Controllers

    • Seccomp, AppArmor, PodSecurity admission

  3. Network Policies

    • Allow/deny rules between pods

8. Observability & Debugging

  1. Logging

    • Centralized log collection (ELK, Fluentd)

  2. Monitoring & Metrics

    • kube-state-metrics, Node exporter, Prometheus + Grafana

  3. Debugging Tools

    • kubectl describe, logs, exec, port-forward, events

9. Cluster Administration & Maintenance

  1. Upgrades & Patching

    • Control-plane vs. node upgrades

  2. Backup & Restore

    • etcd snapshots, Velero

  3. High Availability

    • Multi-master setups, etcd clustering

10. Scaling & Advanced Patterns

  1. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) & Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

  2. Cluster Autoscaler

  3. Custom Resources & Operators

    • CRDs, Operator pattern

  4. Service Mesh

    • Istio, Linkerd basics

Next Steps

  1. Hands-On Labs: Spin up a mini cluster (kind or minikube) and deploy each workload type.

  2. White-boarding: Draw your cluster architecture, failure scenarios, and upgrade paths.

  3. Practice Q&A: “How does Kubernetes ensure desired state?”, “Explain etcd’s role in consistency.”

Good luck with your Kubernetes prep—you’ve got this! 🚀

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