Competencies: DevOps > Container Orchestration
Container Orchestration
Body of Knowledge
| Topic | Description | Relevance | Career Tracks |
|---|---|---|---|
Kubernetes Operations |
Cluster administration, upgrades, backup (etcd), node management, resource quotas, limit ranges. |
Critical |
Platform Engineer, SRE |
Helm |
Chart structure, values files, templating, hooks, dependencies, chart repositories, Helm secrets. |
Critical |
DevOps, Platform Engineer |
Kustomize |
Base/overlay pattern, patches, transformers, generators, vs Helm decision, integration with ArgoCD. |
High |
DevOps, Platform Engineer |
EKS/AKS/GKE |
Managed Kubernetes, cluster creation, node groups, networking, IAM integration, upgrades. |
High |
Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer |
Service Mesh (Istio/Linkerd) |
Sidecar proxy, mTLS, traffic management, observability, canary deployments, service mesh overhead. |
Medium |
Platform Engineer, SRE |
Ingress Controllers |
NGINX Ingress, Traefik, HAProxy, cert-manager integration, path-based routing, rate limiting. |
High |
Platform Engineer, DevOps |
Kubernetes Networking |
CNI plugins (Calico, Cilium), NetworkPolicies, service types, DNS, cross-cluster networking. |
High |
Platform Engineer, Network Engineer |
Kubernetes Storage |
StorageClasses, CSI drivers, dynamic provisioning, Longhorn, Rook-Ceph, backup with Velero. |
High |
Platform Engineer, Storage Engineer |
Nomad |
HashiCorp orchestrator, job files, task drivers, multi-region, federation, comparison with K8s. |
Low |
Platform Engineer (HashiCorp stack) |
Docker Swarm |
Swarm mode, services, stacks, secrets, configs, overlay networking, comparison with K8s. |
Low |
DevOps (small scale) |
Personal Status
| Topic | Level | Evidence | Active Projects | Gaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Docker / Podman |
Intermediate |
Dockerfile authoring for development environments; Podman rootless containers on Arch; multi-stage builds for domus-api |
No Docker Swarm, no production container deployment, no image optimization beyond basics |
|
k3s Deployment |
Intermediate |
k3s cluster — single-node and 3-node configurations; kubectl, Helm chart installation, service/ingress resources, persistent volumes |
No Helm chart authoring, no Kustomize, no GitOps deployment (ArgoCD/Flux) |