Jump right into Kubernetes development with career-focused lessons and hands-on practice.

DevOps for Developers

Kubernetes is a powerful container management tool that's taking the world by storm. This detailed course will help you master it.

In this course, you'll start with the fundamentals of Kubernetes and what the main components of a cluster look like. You'll then learn how to use those components to build, test, deploy, and upgrade applications, as well as how to achieve state persistence once your application is deployed. You'll also learn how to secure your deployments and manage resources, which are crucial DevOps skills.

By the time you're done, you'll have a firm grasp on what Kubernetes is, as well as the skills to deploy your own clusters and applications with confidence.

A Practical Guide to Kubernetes

# Understanding Pods

 **Pods** are equivalent to bricks that we use to build houses. Both are uneventful and not much by themselves. Yet, they are fundamental building blocks without which we could not construct the solution we are set to build.

If you have used *Docker or Docker Swarm*, you're probably used to thinking that a *container is the smallest unit* and that more complex patterns are built on top of it. With Kubernetes, the *smallest unit is a Pod*. 
> **Note:** A **Pod** is a way to represent a running process in a cluster. 

From Kubernetes' perspective, there's nothing smaller than a Pod.

A Pod encapsulates one or more containers. It provides a unique network IP, attaches storage resources, and decides how containers should run. Everything in a Pod is tightly coupled.

We should clarify that containers in a Pod are not necessarily made by Docker. Other container runtimes are supported as well. Docker is, however, one of the most commonly used container runtimes, and we'll use it in all our examples.


Since we cannot create Pods without a Kubernetes cluster, our first order of business is to a Kubernetes cluster.

# Creating a cluster

In this course, we use the `k3d` clusters on our platform. `k3d` is an open-source wrapper to run lightweight `K3s` clusters on Docker containers. 

> **Note:** For you to practice this course on the Educative platform, all necessary toolkits and installations have been taken care of. However, if you want to experiment with clusters on your local machine, please refer to the [appendix](https://www.educative.io/pageeditor/10370001/5920988434792448/5672108472401920) section of this course. 

We'll use the `k3d cluster create` command to create 

Learn what are Pods, and how to create a Kubernetes cluster. 

Getting Started with Pods

Learn what are Pods, and how to create a Kubernetes cluster.