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.
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.
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.
A Deployment is using a disk-backed emptyDir volume. Convert it to a memory-backed tmpfs volume for better performance — but make sure to set a size limit to prevent the Pod from exhausting the node's RAM.
Combine an existing ConfigMap and Secret into one volume and mount them at a single path inside a Pod — using only one volume definition.
Add a sidecar container to an existing Deployment that tails a shared log file written by the main application container. Use a shared volume to make the log file available to both containers.
Create a Pod with a main application container and a sidecar container that continuously streams shared logs. Kubernetes implements sidecar containers as a special case of init containers.
Use emptyDir volumes to share data between containers, understand the volume lifecycle across container restarts and pod deletion, and explore memory-backed ephemeral storage.
Harden a container by implementing a read-only root filesystem with specific writable volumes for nginx. This is a critical security practice to prevent runtime modifications.
Practice static storage provisioning in Kubernetes by creating a PersistentVolume backed by hostPath, binding it to a PersistentVolumeClaim, and mounting it in a Deployment — a core CKAD skill for storage management.
