Study Guide: Kubernetes Certified Security Associate (KCSA)

I’ve been studying for the Kubernetes Certified Security Associate (KCSA) exam, and I thought it would be helpful to document my study notes and share them with others who are also preparing for the exam.

This article is a bit long but it will cover everything you need to know to pass the KCSA exam. I’ll be updating this article as I find additional content to share, so make sure to bookmark it and check back often.

Publishing Helm Charts to GitHub Container Registry

So you have a local Helm chart that you want to share with others?

In this quick tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of publishing Helm charts to your very own Helm repository using GitHub Container Registry and GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions.

Before you begin, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• A GitHub account
• A GitHub repository with your Helm chart
• GitHub CLI installed on your local machine
• Bash shell

GitHub Pages Setup

We will use GitHub Pages to host the Helm repository. So you will need to create a new branch called gh-pages. This branch will contain the Helm chart binaries and a README.md file with instructions on how to use the helm repo and install its charts.

Publishing Container Images to GitHub Container Registry

Do you have a container image that you want to share with the world? GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) is a great place to store and share your container images. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to publish container images to GHCR using GitHub Actions.

Start by creating a new repository on GitHub or cloning an existing one. Then make sure you have a Dockerfile in the root of your repository.

You Down with PDB?

P.D.B. how can I explain it
I’ll take you frame by frame it
To have y’all all jumpin’, shoutin’, sayin’ it
P is for Pod, D is for Disruption, reboot and watch it ripple
The last B, well, that’s super simple

~ An ode to Naughty by Nature’s track titled O.P.P. which Microsoft Copilot helped me write 😂

Overview

In this post, we’ll take a look at Kubernetes Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs) and how they can be used to ensure that your applications remain available during planned disruptions.

Soaring to New Heights with Kaito: The Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator

Earlier today at KubeCon Europe 2024, Jorge Palma of the AKS team gave a keynote talk on Kaito, the Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator.

Next keynote speaker @jorgefpalma 🙌 we are truly living in the AI revolution pic.twitter.com/ATxLWUKDeD

— CNCF (@CloudNativeFdn) March 20, 2024

This tool has been released as an open-source project a few months back and you may or may not have heard of it.

So if you don’t know, now you know…

You’re probably thinking, “but what is it, and what can it do for me?” 🤔

Strengthening the Secure Supply Chain

This post will walk you through a demo I presented at the SCaLE21X conference. The session is titled, Strengthening the Secure Supply Chain with Project Copacetic, Eraser, and FluxCD and this step-by-step guide will enable you do it on your own.

Prerequisites

To begin, you will need to have the following:

• Docker Desktop to run a Kubernetes cluster locally
• Git to clone the demo repository
• GitHub account

We will also be using the following tools:

Bootstrap your GitOps-enabled AKS cluster with Terraform: A code sample using the Flux v2 K8s Extension

In my previous posts, we learned how to get started with GitOps on AKS using the K8s extension for AKS.

Then, we took a look at the Flux CLI and explored how it can be used to bootstrap your cluster and generate FluxCD manifests so that we can use GitOps to implement GitOps 🤯, and implemented Flux’s image update automation capability.

From there, we built on the concept of image update automation, and showed you how you can use Flagger to automate canary deployments.