Series

Kubernetes fundamentals

The ground floor. If you're new to Kubernetes or you've been using it for a while but feel like you're cargo-culting your way through YAML, start here. We go from cluster architecture all the way through storage, networking, and resource management — the kind of stuff that turns "it works on my machine" into "it works on the cluster, and I can tell you exactly why."

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    Part 1 – Why does Kubernetes exist?

    Let’s be honest: the Kubernetes docs are a bit of a wall. You go looking for a simple explanation of what the thing actually is, and you end up reading about “container orchestration platforms” and “desired state…

    6 min read

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    Part 2 – The control plane and worker nodes

    In the last post we talked about why Kubernetes exists — the bin-packing chaos that happens when you’re running a lot of containers across a lot of servers without any coordination layer. Now let’s look at how…

    7 min read

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    Part 3 — Pods: the smallest unit of work

    If you’ve spent any time around Kubernetes documentation, you’ve seen the word “pod” used constantly — often without a great explanation of what it actually is or why it exists. Most people assume a pod is just a…

    6 min read

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    Part 4 — Deployments and ReplicaSets

    In the last post we established that bare pods are fragile — if one dies, it stays dead. Nobody’s watching it. You’d have to notice the problem yourself and fix it manually, which is exactly the kind of toil…

    6 min read

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    Part 5 — Services: giving pods a stable address

    Here’s a problem that becomes obvious the moment you try to connect two things in a Kubernetes cluster. In the last post we established that pods are ephemeral — they die and get replaced, and the replacement gets a…

    7 min read

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    Part 6 — ConfigMaps and Secrets

    There’s a pattern that shows up constantly in immature container setups: configuration baked directly into the container image. The database hostname, the log level, the feature flags — all hardcoded at build time.…

    7 min read

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    Part 7 Storage: volumes, PVs, and PVCs

    Everything we’ve covered so far has been pleasantly stateless. Pods come and go, get replaced, move between nodes — and because they don’t hold any important data locally, that’s fine. But at some point your cluster…

    7 min read

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    Part 8 — Resource requests, limits, and scheduling

    This is the post where we talk about one of the most consequential — and most commonly misconfigured — parts of running Kubernetes in production. Get resource requests and limits right and your cluster runs…

    9 min read

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    Part 9 — Health checks: liveness, readiness, and startup probes

    Here’s something that surprises a lot of people coming to Kubernetes for the first time. A pod in Running state doesn’t mean your application is actually working. It means the container process started. Those are…

    9 min read

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    Part 10 — Day-2 operations: what running Kubernetes actually looks like

    The first nine posts in this series covered the building blocks — pods, deployments, services, storage, health checks. If you’ve followed along, you have a solid mental model of how Kubernetes works. But there’s a…

    9 min read