Challenges

Focused, hands-on DevOps and server-side problems with hints, feedback, and automated solution checks.

Challenge

Lock Down Container Syscalls With Seccomp Profiles

Run a Deployment under the container runtime's seccomp profile, roll out a custom profile to the worker nodes, and fix a profile that blocks a syscall the application needs.

Challenge

Roll Out Pod Security Standards Across Three Namespaces

The platform team is rolling out Pod Security Admission. A monitoring agent is already blocked, the storefront team needs a staged rollout, and payments must move to the strictest level without losing its running service.

Challenge

CKA Practice: Renew Expiring Control Plane Certificates

kubectl is dead: the kube-apiserver certificate expired and the control plane is down, while the workload quietly keeps serving. Diagnose the expiry offline, renew the certificates, bring the control plane back, and prove the cluster recovered.

Challenge

Issue Per-Pod mTLS Certificates with PodCertificateRequest

Kubernetes 1.37 can hand every pod its own short-lived X.509 identity, no service mesh and no sidecar involved. The API is served out of the box, but it issues nothing without a signer, and a request nobody answers leaves the pod waiting forever. Get a stalled workload its certificates, give its client an identity of its own, and make the server actually enforce mutual TLS.

Challenge

Troubleshoot CrashLoopBackOff Caused by a Missing TLS Secret

A deployment is failing because the application cannot load its TLS certificate. Create the missing secret and mount it into the deployment so the Flask app can serve TLS traffic.

Challenge

Schedule a Maintenance Pod with Host Namespace Access Using Taints, Tolerations, and NodeSelector

Learn how to taint a node, schedule a Pod using nodeSelector and tolerations, and share the host network, PID, and IPC namespaces with the Pod.