Focused, hands-on problems for sharpening your DevOps and server-side skills. Some teach specific concepts while others mirror real-world scenarios. Every challenge includes hints, feedback, and automated solution checks.
A new intern learning about probes wrote a small Pod manifest. The exec command and the application are both correct, but the Pod never becomes Ready because one probe parameter is missing. Find it and add it.
The security team left five NetworkPolicy files on the workstation. Only one of them lets the frontend reach the backend while granting nothing more. Identify it and deploy it, unchanged.
A Deployment is running in the platform namespace with 3 replicas. Each pod has configuration files at /app/config/. Copy those files to /home/laborant/config/ on the local machine.
A Snake game Deployment and ClusterIP Service are already running in the snake namespace. Create a Traefik Ingress that serves the game over HTTPS using an existing cert-manager-issued TLS Secret.
Learn how to configure a Kubernetes CronJob to automatically take etcd snapshot backups every 6 hours — a critical skill for cluster disaster recovery and operational health.
Learn how to reconfigure the Kubernetes cluster DNS domain by updating CoreDNS ConfigMap and kubelet configuration on all nodes, a critical skill for custom cluster networking and CKA exam preparation.
A Deployment running a distroless Chainguard nginx image (cgr.dev/chainguard/nginx) is deployed in the namespace webapps, fronted by a ClusterIP Service. Port-forward that Service to localhost port 3333 on cplane-01, use curl to save the response body to /home/laborant/index.html, and verify the file is accessible and contains the expected content.
A Job manifest at /home/laborant/batch-job.yaml is exiting with a non-zero exit status. The Job has limited retries configured. Inspect the cluster and the manifest to find the bug, fix it, and reapply.
A helper script that lists every container image running in the cluster — along with its on-disk size and the workload that uses it — has been downloaded to cplane-01. Install it as a kubectl plugin named kubectl-images so that kubectl images works from any directory.
Create a Pod that uses a generic ephemeral volume backed by a dynamic StorageClass. Unlike emptyDir, ephemeral volumes are provisioned as PersistentVolumeClaims and support storage requests and access modes.