Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 Exam Details and Resources 1

Exam Objectives 1

Curriculum 2

Cluster Architecture, Installation, and Configuration 2

Workloads and Scheduling 3

Services and Networking 3

Storage 3

Troubleshooting 3

Involved Kubernetes Primitives 4

Exam Environment and Tips 4

Candidate Skills 6

Time Management 7

Command-Line Tips and Tricks 7

Setting a Context and Namespace 7

Using an Alias for kubectl 8

Using kubectl Command Auto-Completion 8

Internalize Resource Short Names 8

Deleting Kubernetes Objects 9

Finding Object Information 9

Discovering Command Options 10

Practicing and Practice Exams 11

Summary 12

2 Cluster Architecture, Installation, and Configuration 13

Role-Based Access Control 14

RBAC High-Level Overview 14

Creating a Subject 15

Listing Service Accounts 17

Rendering Service Account Details 18

Assigning a ServiceAccount to a Pod 18

Understanding RBAC API Primitives 19

Default User-Facing Roles 19

Creating Roles 20

Listing Roles 21

Rendering Role Details 21

Creating RoleBindings 22

Listing RoleBindings 22

Rendering RoleBinding Details 23

Seeing the RBAC Rules in Effect 23

Namespace-wide and Cluster-wide RBAC 24

Aggregating RBAC Rules 24

Creating and Managing a Kubernetes Cluster 26

Installing a Cluster 27

Managing a Highly Available Cluster 31

Upgrading a Cluster Version 32

Backing Up and Restoring etcd 38

Backing Up etcd 39

Restoring etcd 41

Summary 42

Exam Essentials 43

Sample Exercises 44

3 Workloads 45

Managing Workloads with Deployments 45

Understanding Deployments 46

Creating Deployments 47

Listing Deployments and Their Pods 48

Rendering Deployment Details 49

Deleting a Deployment 50

Performing Rolling Updates and Rollbacks 51

Rolling Out a New Revision 51

Rolling Back to a Previous Revision 52

Scaling Workloads 53

Manually Scaling a Deployment 53

Manually Scaling a StatefulSet 54

Autoscaling a Deployment 56

Creating Horizontal Pod Autoscalers 56

Listing Horizontal Pod Autoscalers 57

Rendering Horizontal Pod Autoscaler Details 58

Using the Beta API Version of an Horizontal Pod Autoscaler 58

Defining and Consuming Configuration Data 60

Creating a ConfigMap 61

Consuming a ConfigMap as Environment Variables 62

Mounting a ConfigMap as a Volume 63

Creating a Secret 64

Consuming a Secret as Environment Variables 66

Mounting a Secret as a Volume 66

Summary 67

Exam Essentials 68

Sample Exercises 68

4 Scheduling and Tooling 71

Understanding How Resource Limits Affect Pod Scheduling 71

Defining Container Resource Requests 72

Defining Container Resource Limits 74

Defining Container Resource Requests and Limits 76

Managing Objects 77

Declarative Object Management Using Configuration Files 77

Declarative Object Management Using Kustomize 80

Common Templating Tools 88

Using the YAML Processor yq 88

Using Helm 90

Summary 93

Exam Essentials 93

Sample Exercises 94

5 Services and Networking 95

Kubernetes Networking Basics 95

Connectivity Between Containers 96

Connectivity Between Pods 97

Understanding Services 99

Service Types 100

Creating Services 100

Listing Services 101

Rendering Service Details 102

Port Mapping 103

Accessing a Service with Type ClusterIP 103

Accessing a Service with Type NodePort 105

Accessing a Service with Type LoadBalancer 107

Understanding Ingress 108

Ingress Rules 109

Creating Ingresses 110

Defining Path Types 110

Listing Ingresses 111

Rendering Ingress Details 111

Accessing an Ingress 112

Using and Configuring CoreDNS 113

Inspecting the CoreDNS Pod 113

Inspecting the CoreDNS Configuration 114

Customizing the CoreDNS Configuration 115

DNS for Services 115

Resolving a Service by Hostname from the Same Namespace 115

Resolving a Service by Hostname from a Different Namespace 116

DNS for Pods 118

Resolving a Pod by Hostname 118

Choosing an Appropriate Container Network Interface Plugin 119

Summary 120

Exam Essentials 121

Sample Exercises 121

6 Storage 123

Understanding Volumes 124

Volume Types 124

Creating and Accessing Volumes 125

Understanding Persistent Volumes 126

Static vs. Dynamic Provisioning 127

Creating PersistentVolumes 127

Configuration Options for a PersistentVolume 128

Volume Mode 128

Access Mode 129

Reclaim Policy 129

Creating PersistentVolumeClaims 130

Mounting PersistentVolumeClaims in a Pod 131

Understanding Storage Classes 132

Creating Storage Classes 133

Using Storage Classes 133

Summary 134

Exam Essentials 135

Sample Exercises 136

7 Troubleshooting 137

Evaluating Cluster and Node Logging 137

Cluster Logging 138

Node Logging 140

Monitoring Cluster Components and Applications 140

Troubleshooting Application Failures 142

Troubleshooting Pods 142

Opening an Interactive Shell 144

Troubleshooting Services 145

Troubleshooting Cluster Failures 146

Troubleshooting Control Plane Nodes 147

Troubleshooting Worker Nodes 148

Summary 152

Exam Essentials 153

Sample Exercises 153

8 Wrapping Up 155

Appendix. Answers to Review Questions 157

Index 179