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.
The storefront APIs are served through a Traefik Ingress with TLS and two path rules. Reproduce that configuration with a Gateway and an HTTPRoute on the same hostname, cut traffic over to it, and retire the Ingress.
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.
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.
Every kubectl command against a kubeadm cluster fails, and the workload is still serving. With no API to query, the usual tools tell you nothing. Work from the node itself to find what broke and bring the control plane back.
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 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.
Add the official Argo CD Helm repository, then use helm template to render the Argo CD chart for a dedicated namespace while skipping the chart's bundled CRDs, since they are already installed in the cluster.
Configure a Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) with a per-container resource policy that provides recommendations for the main container while excluding the sidecar container from any VPA-managed scaling.
A webapp deployment in the prod namespace is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. The application's startup probe checks that its existing config directory is intact before the container is marked healthy. Fix the deployment so configuration is injected correctly and the pod reaches Running state with its health check endpoint responding on port 8080.
