Lab trackKubernetes Labs

Kubernetes hands-on labs

Eighteen real Kubernetes clusters, free. From your first Pod to a hardened, publicly routed application with least-privilege access — no videos, no reading, just work you do in a live environment.

  • 18 labs
  • 8.8 h
  • Beginner
  • Free
Start with the first lab

Free with a free account — it runs in your browser, nothing to install.

  • A real environment in your browser
  • You run the commands yourself
  • Your result is checked automatically

Labs in this track

18 labsFree

Module 1 — Kubernetes Foundations

4 labs
  1. Your First Cluster20 min4.7
  2. Pods and the Lifecycle25 min4.6
  3. Deployments and Reconciliation30 min4.5
  4. Write the Manifests Yourself40 min4.2

Module 2 — Running Applications

4 labs
  1. Deploy and Reach a Web Application40 min5.0
  2. ConfigMaps and Secrets30 min5.0
  3. Probes and Resource Limits30 min5.0
  4. Jobs and CronJobs25 min5.0

Module 3 — Networking and Exposure

4 labs
  1. Services, DNS, and NodePort30 min5.0
  2. Ingress and HTTP Routing30 min5.0
  3. Network Policies30 min5.0
  4. Expose and Harden the Stack45 min5.0

Module 4 — Identity and Access

6 labs
  1. Your First ServiceAccount20 min5.0
  2. Give a ServiceAccount Limited Access25 min5.0
  3. Role or ClusterRole?25 min5.0
  4. Namespace Isolation25 min5.0
  5. Debug the Forbidden Error25 min5.0
  6. Production RBAC Incident35 min5.0

About this track

A lab-only path through Kubernetes, free for everyone with a Kube-Ops Academy account.

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Every item is a real single-node cluster you launch in the browser: you read a live control plane, run and break Pods, hand the cluster a desired state and watch it reconcile, publish an application through Ingress, lock its network down to default-deny, and finish by taking cluster-admin away from a workload without taking the workload down.

There are no video lectures and no reading-only lessons. Each of the four modules closes with a short quiz on what you just did.

What you'll learn

  • Read a running control plane and scope your work with namespaces
  • Tell Succeeded, Failed and CrashLoopBackOff apart, and use logs as evidence
  • Hand the cluster a desired state in YAML and let the controllers keep it true
  • Deliver configuration as ConfigMaps and Secrets, and rotate it without a rebuild
  • Say what healthy means with probes, and what your workload costs with requests and limits
  • Follow a request from the outside world through Ingress, Service and DNS down to a Pod
  • Close a namespace to default-deny and open exactly one path
  • Give a workload an identity, grant it the minimum, and prove the denials as carefully as the grants

Prerequisites

Comfort in a Linux shell, and enough container background to know what an image is. If you have none, take Docker hands-on labs first — it is also free.

No cluster of your own is needed. Every lab runs a real Kubernetes cluster in your browser.

Who it's for

Engineers who have just been handed a cluster, developers whose applications now ship to Kubernetes, and anyone preparing for a CKA-style practical exam who wants the practice rather than the slides.

FAQ

Is this really free? Yes. Register, enrol, and launch. No subscription, no card.

How many times can I launch a lab? Five launches per lab, one at a time.

Do I need to install anything? No. The cluster and the terminal are in the browser.