Kubernetes Operations
Kubernetes operations covers the day-to-day management of production clusters: upgrades, scaling, backup, disaster recovery, certificate rotation, resource quota management, and the operational practices that keep a Kubernetes platform reliable.
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Intro
Kubernetes Operations
Running applications on Kubernetes and running Kubernetes itself are different jobs, and this course is about the second one: the lifecycle work that keeps a cluster healthy over months and years. Upgrades, node maintenance, etcd care, capacity, certificates, and the discipline that ties them together. Even if a cloud provider manages your control plane, roughly half of this work remains yours — and knowing which half is itself operational knowledge.
The mental model: a cluster is cattle around a precious core. Nodes are replaceable by design — drain, upgrade or discard, replace. The control plane's state, concentrated in etcd, is the one thing that is genuinely irreplaceable. Operations is the practice of exploiting the replaceable parts' replaceability while guarding the core.
The rhythm: upgrades
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Sources
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/
Supports
- Scope of cluster administration — lifecycle, securing, managing a cluster, add-ons
- Managed vs self-managed responsibility framing
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/architecture/nodes/
Supports
- Node registration, conditions (Ready, MemoryPressure, DiskPressure, PIDPressure)
- Node controller behavior — tainting unreachable nodes, eviction of their Pods
- https://kubernetes.io/releases/version-skew-policy/
Supports
- kube-apiserver as version leader; kubelet up to 3 minors older, never newer
- Component upgrade ordering; sequential minor upgrades
- https://kubernetes.io/releases/
Supports
- Approximately 3 minor releases per year with ~14 months of patch support
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/cluster-upgrade/
Supports
- Upgrade strategy — control plane then nodes then add-ons; release note review; deprecated API migration
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/safely-drain-node/
Supports
- Cordon/drain/uncordon workflow; PDB-honoring graceful eviction; --ignore-daemonsets behavior
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/disruptions/
Supports
- Voluntary vs involuntary disruptions; PDB semantics during maintenance
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/configure-upgrade-etcd/
Supports
- Odd-member quorum sizing and failure tolerance
- Hardware/latency sensitivity, TLS for peers and clients
- Snapshot backup (etcdctl snapshot save) and restore procedures
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/kubeadm/kubeadm-certs/
Supports
- One-year certificate validity for kubeadm clusters; renewal on upgrade; check-expiration and renew commands
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/cluster-autoscaling/
Supports
- Node-axis autoscaling — scale-up on unschedulable Pods, drain-based scale-down of underutilized nodes
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/deprecation-guide/
Supports
- Deprecated API migration guidance ahead of removals