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Docker & Kubernetes — The Real-Life Field Guide (Beginner → Production)

A hands-on, example-driven path from "what is a container" to running a production-grade, auto-scaling, self-healing, fully observable cloud system on Kubernetes.

52 chapters · 2 h 31 min of reading

Where this fits: it picks up where step 1 of the series, Operating Systems, Linux & Containers, leaves off. Its Phase 3 builds containers from namespaces and cgroups and introduces Kubernetes; this guide takes the same ideas to production.

Read alongside: Go (every service here is Go) · Security Engineering in Depth (cloud and Kubernetes security, beyond Part VI) · Scale, Load & Performance Testing (the load-testing theory behind §27.7).

Day by day: the 90-day DevOps plan schedules this guide's labs week by week.

Contents

52 chapters, one page each. Prefer one long page? Read the whole book on one page.

  1. How to use this guide2 min
  2. The system we build: "Orbit"2 min
  3. Prerequisites and tooling1 min
  4. Table of contents1 min
  5. Part 0 — The Lab Environment
  6. 0. Lab environment: a Linux VM on your Mac12 min
  7. Part I — Containers & Docker
  8. 1. What a container actually is3 min
  9. 2. Docker architecture and core CLI2 min
  10. 3. Images and Dockerfiles from first principles3 min
  11. 4. Production-grade Dockerfiles7 min
  12. 5. Docker networking1 min
  13. 6. Docker storage: volumes, bind mounts, tmpfs1 min
  14. 7. Docker Compose: the whole system on your laptop3 min
  15. 8. Docker security and the software supply chain2 min
  16. 9. Debugging containers2 min
  17. 10. Registries, tagging, and multi-arch builds1 min
  18. 11. Part I capstone: Orbit under Compose, fully working5 min
  19. Part II — Kubernetes Core
  20. 12. Kubernetes architecture: the control loop4 min
  21. 13. Pods: the unit of everything4 min
  22. 14. Deployments, ReplicaSets, and rollouts2 min
  23. 15. Services, DNS, and the networking model2 min
  24. 16. Configuration: ConfigMaps, Secrets, and the Downward API2 min
  25. 17. Storage: Volumes, PVs, PVCs, StorageClasses1 min
  26. 18. StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, and CronJobs3 min
  27. 19. Namespaces, labels, and organizing a cluster1 min
  28. 20. Part II capstone: Orbit from raw manifests2 min
  29. Part III — Production Workloads
  30. 21. Health checks: probes done right2 min
  31. 22. Self-healing and auto-recovery3 min
  32. 23. Resources, QoS, and right-sizing3 min
  33. 24. Scheduling: placement for resilience3 min
  34. 25. Traffic in: Gateway API, TLS, and cert-manager3 min
  35. 26. Packaging: Kustomize and Helm2 min
  36. 27. Autoscaling: pods, sizes, and nodes6 min
  37. Part IV — Observability
  38. 28. Observability strategy2 min
  39. 29. Instrumenting Orbit with OpenTelemetry5 min
  40. 30. Deploying the observability stack7 min
  41. 31. Metrics, dashboards, and alerting4 min
  42. 32. SLOs and burn-rate alerting2 min
  43. Part V — Debugging
  44. 33. The Kubernetes debugging playbook6 min
  45. Part VI — Security
  46. 34. Securing the cluster and the workloads7 min
  47. Part VII — Delivery
  48. 35. CI: build, test, scan, sign, publish3 min
  49. 36. GitOps with Argo CD3 min
  50. 37. Progressive delivery: canary with automatic rollback3 min
  51. 38. Database migrations in a continuously deployed system2 min
  52. Part VIII — Reliability Operations
  53. 39. Backup and disaster recovery4 min
  54. 40. Chaos engineering2 min
  55. 41. Cost and capacity1 min
  56. 42. Going to the cloud: Orbit on EKS4 min
  57. Part IX — Capstone and Reference
  58. 43. Capstone: assemble and verify the whole system3 min
  59. 44. Production-readiness checklist1 min
  60. 45. Cheat sheets1 min
  61. 46. Pitfalls that cause real outages1 min
  62. 47. Further reading: the real-life references2 min

Generated from real-life-k8s-guide.md · 8 Oct 2026 16:36