Cloud, DevOps, and Kubernetes in Practice

A practical course on cloud, DevOps, and Kubernetes — from culture and containers to production operation of clusters. Aimed at a developer or engineer who wants to confidently deploy and operate services in a cloud-native environment: to understand containers, orchestration, configuration, storage, networking, observability, CI/CD, GitOps, infrastructure as code, and security.

The course is built around the declarative model: you describe the desired state of the system, and the platform brings reality to it and holds it there. This is the through-line of all modern DevOps — from Kubernetes manifests to Terraform and GitOps. Once you master it, you stop “clicking buttons by hand” and start managing infrastructure as code: versioned, reproducible, reviewable.

Topics build up: DevOps and cloud foundations, containers and Docker, Kubernetes architecture, workloads (Pod/Deployment/StatefulSet), networking and Service/Ingress, configuration and secrets, storage and state, packaging (Helm/Kustomize), observability, CI/CD and GitOps, infrastructure as code and security, production and scaling. Examples are given as of mid-2026 (Kubernetes 1.3x, ArgoCD/Flux, OpenTelemetry) — the principles matter more than the specific versions, which update constantly.

Each lesson contains theory, examples (YAML manifests and kubectl/CLI commands), a checklist of practical tasks, and a quiz. It’s convenient to practice on a local cluster (kind/minikube/k3s) or in a managed cloud. The main principle: infrastructure is code. Anything done “by hand” and not written down is technical debt and a source of drift between environments.