Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Beginner to Pro

By Tim Berry

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is Google's fully managed Kubernetes platform. Learn the basics and leverage GKE for easy app deployment, management and scaling on GCP.

5.5 hours
  • 44 Lessons
  • 3 Course Quizzes

About the course

Not many technologies have had the rapid success that Kubernetes has enjoyed in the past few years. By taking the game-changing developer technology of containers and orchestrating them for production, Kubernetes has been deployed in some of the biggest cloud compute projects by some huge household names. But to many people it seems like learning a whole new skill set – what are pods, deployments, annotations, and node affinities anyway?

Don’t panic! This course will guide you from the absolute basics of how and why to use containers, to running them at scale with Kubernetes. The heavy lifting of actually crafting a cluster from magic dust and ancient spells is done for you by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), so you can concentrate on deploying your app and seeing it scale to global success. Once you’re up and running with your apps in GKE, we’ll then touch on some advanced topics so you’re really making the most of everything it has to offer.

In this course, you’ll learn:

  • The benefits of using containers for packaging and running applications.
  • How to orchestrate containers using Kubernetes.
  • Working with stateless and stateful applications, persistent storage, and databases with Kubernetes.
  • Advanced GKE features, including regional failover and global load balancing.

No prior container or Kubernetes experience is required – this course really will take you from beginner to pro!

Keep being awesome, Cloud Gurus!

Note: The Github for the course materials/scripts can be found at this link:

[https://github.com/ACloudGuru-Resources/Course_GKE_Beginner_To_Pro]()

  • Chapter 1 8 Lessons Intro to Containers 37:06

    An Important Note About A Cloud Guru and Linux Academy Courses

    1:18

    Welcome

    2:04

    A Note About Demo Lessons

    0:54

    In the Beginning was the Server

    4:30

    Containers to the Rescue

    4:48

    Your First Container

    5:47

    Demo: Your First Container

    12:15

    Ready to Start Your Container Journey?

    5:30
  • Chapter 2 9 Lessons Intro to GKE 1:31:54

    The Anatomy of a Cluster

    7:25

    Demo: Creating a GKE Cluster

    10:29

    Forget Containers, Meet Pods!

    5:32

    Demo: Creating Pods

    10:36

    ReplicaSets and Deployments

    5:37

    Accessing Applications

    4:57

    Demo: Deployments and Services

    14:40

    Demo: Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging

    17:38

    Chapter 2 Quiz

    15:00 Quiz
  • Chapter 3 12 Lessons Deploying Applications 1:52:34

    Putting it all Together: Stateless Application Example

    9:20

    Pod Reliability with Health Checks

    4:08

    Accessing External Services

    2:54

    Demo: Maintaining a Service with Unhealthy Pods

    22:52

    Volumes and Persistent Storage

    7:13

    Demo: Volumes and Persistent Storage

    11:46

    ConfigMaps and Secrets

    3:45

    Deployment Patterns

    5:21

    Demo: Deployment Patterns

    13:08

    Autoscaling all the Things

    5:16

    Demo: Autoscaling all the Things

    11:51

    Chapter 3 Quiz

    15:00 Quiz
  • Chapter 4 11 Lessons Advanced GKE Operations 1:43:01

    Helm: The Kubernetes Package Manager

    5:00

    Demo: Deploying Applications with Helm

    11:40

    Advances Ingress Control

    2:55

    Demo: Routing Traffic with Ingress Controllers

    14:43

    High Availability Clusters and Workloads

    4:09

    Running a Secure GKE Cluster

    10:08

    Enhancing Cluster Nodes with DaemonSets

    2:05

    Stateful Applications and Workloads

    6:36

    Finite Tasks and Init Containers

    5:01

    Demo: Running a Stateful Cassandra Database

    25:44

    Chapter 4 Quiz

    15:00 Quiz
  • Chapter 5 7 Lessons Wrapping Up 39:58

    What Have We Learned So Far?

    5:59

    Continuous Integration and Deployment

    6:45

    Operators: Adding Logic to Deployments

    5:20

    Istio and Service Meshes

    7:53

    Serverless on Kubernetes

    8:24

    What's Next for GKE?

    4:16

    Thank You and Goodbye

    1:21

What you will need

  • Google Cloud 101 or similar background

  • Basic Linux server skills

What you can expect

  • Understand the basic concepts of containers and when they are a good fit for an application workload.

  • Explain the components of a Kubernetes cluster and the object-based abstractions used to create workloads and services.

  • Understand the advantages of GKE as a managed Kubernetes service.

  • Deploy your own applications to GKE correctly and with confidence.

  • Understand how to use GKE applications with external services such as databases and persistent storage.

  • Discuss advanced topics such as CI/CD and service mesh.

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