Study Guide: Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)

My KCNA certification is up for renewal, and as I’m preparing to retake the exam, it dawned on me that I wrote up a study guide for it never actually published it. Doh! 🫣

So here it is 🤗

The KCNA is a great entry point for anyone looking to validate their foundational knowledge of Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem. I thought it would be helpful to document my study notes and share them with others who are also preparing for the exam.

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.

Progressive Delivery on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using Flagger with Istio and FluxCD

In my previous post, we setup an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to automatically update images based on new image tags in a container registry. As soon as a new image was pushed to the registry the image was immediately updated.

But what if you don’t want an agent automatically pushing out new images without some sort of testing? 🤔

In this article, we’ll build upon Flux’s image update automation capability and add Flagger to implement a canary release strategy.

Automating Image Updates with FluxCD on AKS

In my previous post, we walked through the setup of FluxCD on AKS via AKS extensions. In this article, we’ll go a bit deeper and take a look at how you can use FluxCD to automate image updates in your AKS cluster.

The goal here is to streamline the process of updating your application deployments in your cluster.

Here is our intended workflow:

1. Modify application code, then commit and push the change to the repo.
2. Create a new release in GitHub which kicks off a release workflow to build and push an updated container image to a GitHub Container Registry.
3. FluxCD detects the new image and updates the image tag in the cluster.
4. FluxCD rolls out the new image to the cluster.

We’ll use same AKS store demo app we used in the previous post, but this time we’ll go a bit faster.