Competencies: Infrastructure > Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Body of Knowledge
| Topic | Description | Relevance | Career Tracks |
|---|---|---|---|
Kubernetes Architecture |
Control plane (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller-manager), nodes, kubelet, kube-proxy. |
Critical |
Platform Engineer, SRE, DevOps |
Pods and Workloads |
Pod spec, Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, CronJobs, ReplicaSets, pod lifecycle. |
Critical |
Platform Engineer, Developer, DevOps |
Services and Networking |
ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, Ingress, NetworkPolicies, DNS, service discovery. |
Critical |
Platform Engineer, Network Engineer |
Configuration |
ConfigMaps, Secrets, environment variables, volume mounts, external secrets operators. |
Critical |
DevOps, Platform Engineer |
Storage |
PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses, CSI drivers, dynamic provisioning. |
High |
Platform Engineer, Storage Engineer |
Helm |
Package manager, charts, values, releases, repositories, templating, hooks, chart development. |
Critical |
DevOps, Platform Engineer |
kubectl |
CLI operations, context/namespace management, resource inspection, logs, exec, port-forward. |
Critical |
All Kubernetes roles |
RBAC |
Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, service accounts, security contexts, pod security admission. |
High |
Platform Engineer, Security Engineer |
CRDs and Operators |
Custom resources, operator pattern, controller development, operator framework, OLM. |
High |
Platform Engineer, Developer |
k3s/K3D |
Lightweight Kubernetes, single binary, SQLite/etcd, embedded components, edge deployments. |
Medium |
DevOps, Edge Computing |
Cluster Management |
kubeadm, cluster upgrades, etcd backup, node maintenance, multi-cluster (Rancher, Cluster API). |
High |
Platform Engineer, SRE |
Debugging and Troubleshooting |
Pod debugging, events, logs, describe, ephemeral containers, network debugging. |
Critical |
SRE, Platform Engineer |
Personal Status
| Topic | Level | Evidence | Active Projects | Gaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
k3s / Kubernetes |
Intermediate |
k3s single-node and 3-node cluster in home lab; kubectl, Helm basics, pod/service/ingress; deployed test workloads |
No production Kubernetes, no multi-cluster, no service mesh, no operator development |