Advanced|15 hours|30 lessons

Production Kubernetes Operations

The Day 2 playbook for production Kubernetes. Identity, storage, networking, scaling, monitoring, upgrades, cost management, and disaster recovery — across self-managed and managed clusters. Not cert prep. Not tutorial happy-path. The knowledge teams learn the hard way, packaged before the outage.

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Text-based, no videos
10 modules, 30 lessons
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What you'll learn

The production-readiness checklist: auth, backup, monitoring, upgrades, DR, multi-tenancy, cost
Managed vs self-managed trade-offs — what EKS/GKE/AKS actually manage and the hidden operational costs
Cluster provisioning done right: kubeadm vs kubespray, CNI selection, IaC patterns across clouds
RBAC deep dive plus IRSA (EKS), Workload Identity (GKE), and Azure AD Workload Identity (AKS)
Storage in production: PV/PVC/StorageClass, CSI drivers per cloud, stateful workload patterns
Service types and ingress architecture — when each load-balancer pattern works and when it fails
Network policies and zero-trust via Calico/Cilium — the policies that actually work multi-tenant
Scaling in production: HPA, VPA, KEDA, Cluster Autoscaler vs Karpenter, multi-zone topology spread
Monitoring stack (Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + Tempo) with cardinality budgets that prevent bill shock
The systematic debugging flow — is it the app, the pod, the node, the cluster, or the cloud?
Cluster and add-on upgrade strategies that keep downtime off the user's radar
Where Kubernetes cost actually goes — compute, egress, NAT, load balancers — and how to attribute it
Disaster recovery with Velero and GitOps — the playbook for rebuilding a lost cluster from scratch

Curriculum

10 modules · 30 lessons
01

What "Production-Ready" Actually Means

The mental model that separates hobbyists from operators. The checklist no certification teaches, and why Day 2 dominates total cost of ownership.

3 lessons
Your Cluster Is Not Production-Ready30 minFREEManaged vs Self-Managed: The Real Trade-offs30 minFREECluster Lifecycle Thinking30 minFREE
02

Cluster Provisioning Done Right

Self-managed vs managed provisioning, CNI selection, and the IaC patterns that keep clusters reproducible across clouds.

3 lessons
Provisioning Self-Managed Clusters30 minProvisioning EKS/GKE/AKS Correctly30 minCluster Blueprints and IaC30 min
03

Identity and Access

RBAC deep dive, cloud-provider workload identity on each major cloud, and the right way to handle humans vs service accounts.

3 lessons
Who Can Do What: RBAC Deep Dive30 minCloud Provider Identity30 minHumans vs Service Accounts30 min
04

Storage in Production

Persistent storage fundamentals, cloud CSI differences, and the stateful-workload patterns that survive node failures.

3 lessons
Persistent Storage Fundamentals30 minCloud CSI Drivers: The Real Differences30 minStateful Workloads Deep Dive30 min
05

Networking That Works Under Load

Service types, ingress architecture, and the network policies that keep multi-tenant clusters safe under real load.

3 lessons
Service Types and Load Balancing30 minIngress Architecture30 minNetwork Policies and Zero Trust30 min
06

Scaling in Production

Pod-level and cluster-level autoscaling, plus the multi-zone/multi-region patterns that keep the business running through failures.

3 lessons
HPA, VPA, and KEDA30 minCluster Autoscaling30 minMulti-Zone and Multi-Region30 min
07

Monitoring and Debugging at Scale

The observability stack, the systematic incident-debugging workflow, and the audit logs that answer "who did what?" during compliance reviews.

3 lessons
The Kubernetes Observability Stack30 minDebugging Production Incidents30 minAudit Logs and Compliance30 min
08

Upgrades and Maintenance

Cluster upgrades without user-visible downtime, add-on lifecycle tracking, and the certificate rotation that prevents silent outages.

3 lessons
Cluster Upgrade Strategies30 minCluster Add-on Lifecycle30 minCertificate and Secret Rotation30 min
09

Cost Management

Where the Kubernetes bill actually goes, how to right-size workloads, and the attribution models that let product teams see their own cost.

3 lessons
Where Kubernetes Cost Actually Goes30 minRight-Sizing and Resource Management30 minCost Attribution and Showback30 min
10

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

RPO/RTO for Kubernetes, Velero backups, the GitOps rebuild playbook, and the chaos engineering that keeps all of it real.

3 lessons
The DR Conversation You Should Have30 minRebuilding from Scratch30 minChaos Engineering for Kubernetes30 min

About the Author

Sharon Sahadevan

Sharon Sahadevan

AI Infrastructure Engineer

Building production GPU clusters on Kubernetes — H100s, large-scale model serving, and end-to-end ML infrastructure across Azure and AWS.

10+ years designing cloud-native platforms with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, GitOps (Argo CD), Terraform, and MLOps pipelines for LLM deployment.

Author of KubeNatives, a weekly newsletter read by 3,000+ DevOps and ML engineers for production insights on K8s internals, GPU scheduling, and model-serving patterns.

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