While studying for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification last year, I wanted to take a deep dive into Kubernetes topics, both those covered by the certification and beyond.
As a develeap employee, I had access to all of develeap’s courses which I used to learn more about Kubernetes. Alongside that, I wanted to supplement my learning with books and practice labs. After I earned the CKA certification, I decided to review the field of Kubernetes books and practice labs. In part one of this article series (this article), I review several of the CKA courses I took. In part two, I review Kubernetes practice labs and mock exams in Review of Kubernetes Practice Labs. In part three, I share my take on written materials in The Ultimate Guide to Kubernetes Books: From Beginner to Certified Expert.
KodeKloud
KodeKloud courses are available on their own site and some are also on Udemy. Some courses and labs are only available through a KodeKloud subscription.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests
The gold standard in Kubernetes courses. This course by KodeKloud Training and Mumshad Mannambeth covers everything one needs to know for the CKA exam. The explanations are clear, there are high quality slides and animations for every topic and the topics themselves are well organized. Every section has accompanying practice labs on KodeKloud (the labs are included even if you sign up through Udemy). Each lab runs for one hour but you can repeat every lab as many times as you’d like.
The course includes 22 hours of videos and in addition to the videos you can expect to spend at least that long on the practice labs. I highly recommend doing all the labs even if you don’t watch all of the videos. After every lab there is a solution video where Mumshad shows how to solve all the practice questions; these solution videos are marked as optional, you may choose to skip them when you have solved all the questions yourself; however I found that these solution videos often feature additional tips and tricks or ways to solve the problems that are possibly faster than what I did. Learning through a combination of watching videos and reinforcing the concepts through practice labs leads to very good understanding of the topics in my experience.
Some people wonder if this course alone includes all the content that you need to know for the CKA exam. In my opinion, it certainly does; this course is very thorough and combined with the practice labs it prepares you very well. In a few sections, such as Networking, the course even goes more in-depth than is needed for the CKA exam (as knowing core networking concepts is always useful). Having said that I don’t recommend skipping any sections that are not marked as optional (”Kubernetes The Hard Way” is an optional part of this course which I will cover below).
In addition, the course and labs are constantly updated to keep up with changes to Kubernetes and the CKA exam. For the rest of this paragraph I will go on a slight technical tangent; The one part I felt was missing from this course were additional explanations of container runtimes and the removal of dockershim. Kubernetes v1.24 removed dockershim support. This change is therefore relevant to the CKA exam starting from 2023 when the exam environment moved to Kubernetes v1.26. There is some confusion regarding all this and I think a video explaining this change would’ve been helpful (hopefully it gets added in the future). As of now, the course videos don’t reflect this change, however the practice labs actually do. In some of the practice labs the solution videos show Mumshad using the docker CLI, however the actual practice labs have been updated to use the crictl tool instead. Hopefully the course videos get fully updated to reflect these changes.
Overall I highly recommend this course. If you follow only one course from this list, make sure it is this one. In addition, this course also includes mock exams which I review below (in the “Labs” section).
Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners - Hands-on
Link: KodeKloud | Udemy | O’Reilly
This course by KodeKloud Training and Mumshad Mannambeth is similar to their CKA course, however the difference is it’s designed for “Absolute Beginners” (whereas their CKA course already expects a little bit of familiarity with Kubernetes). If you have no previous experience with Kubernetes, or haven’t worked with it in a while and need a refresher, I recommend taking this Beginners course first before moving on to KodeKloud’s CKA or CKAD courses. However, despite the “Absolute Beginners” title of this course, I would still recommend having some knowledge of Docker/Podman and the Linux command line before moving on to this course (I cover some resources for learning those topics below).
The course includes 6 hours of videos and in addition to the videos you can expect to spend at least that long on the practice labs. I will note that many of the topics in this course are also covered in the KodeKloud CKA/CKAD courses, mainly everything related to the core Kubernetes concepts like Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments and Services. There are however some additional coding exercises though for each of these topics. If you choose to do this course first you can later skip these topics when moving on to the later courses. Despite the repetition, I do think this course offers enough additional content to be worth it in its own right (although in terms of value, it is significantly shorter than the KodeKloud CKA/CKAD courses). I think its introduction to Kubernetes is very good, and in the later parts of the course you get to deploy a relatively complex Microservice Architecture across the three major cloud providers and their respective managed Kubernetes services - GCP (GKE), AWS (EKS) and Azure (AKS).
Courses - Honorable Mentions
TechWorld with Nana
Link: Website | YouTube Channel
Anyone learning DevOps has probably come across Nana’s insightful videos on YouTube.
Nana has many videos on her YouTube channel about Kubernetes which are offered for free! Then on her website she offers full courses. The price difference is stark though, especially compared to the wealth of free content she has on her YouTube channel. Her courses are quite pricey compared to other options. I can’t make a judgement about their value though since I have not tried her paid courses. So instead I will focus on the value offered by Nana’s free YouTube videos.
The TechWorld with Nana YouTube channel has videos on many topics. Kubernetes is certainly one of the prominent topics in her channel, including both short and long videos on this subject. Her videos are great for learning the basics. Her free videos won’t teach you everything you need to know for the CKA or CKAD certifications, but they will give you a good baseline.
Personally I used KodeKloud’s courses for the majority of my learning. However when I wanted to reinforce certain concepts, I often watched Nana’s videos on them to hear them explained in a different way. This was very helpful. Nana explains complex concepts in a very clear way.
Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258)
Link: Linux Foundation - Training
This is the Kubernetes course that is recommended in the “official” learning path by the Linux Foundation. Although it is not a cheap course, it can be bundled together with a purchase of a CKA exam voucher, which can make it affordable when bought during one of their frequent sales (such as Cyber Monday).
The course videos cover all the relevant Kubernetes topics. In terms of labs, you don’t get practice labs like with KodeKloud, instead you are provided instructions for setting up a Kubernetes environment either locally or using a cloud provider (AWS or GCP). Using a cloud provider for all the labs could potentially get expensive though.
Each section starts with videos, continues with lab exercises and ends with a Knowledge Check. The lab exercises have to be run on your own cluster. The Knowledge Check is an interactive quiz testing your knowledge.
Overall this course isn’t bad but I personally think it’s hard to recommend it when comparing it to KodeKloud… Especially for its full price (which is more expensive than KodeKloud’s courses). If you can get in a bundle during a sale then it might be worth it for you, just remember that you will still have to set up your own cluster.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator CKA Video Course by Sander van Vugt
Link: sandervanvugt.com
I have not tried this course personally, however my coworker Lior Dux highly recommends it.
