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.
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 MariaDB deployment and its PVC were accidentally deleted. The PersistentVolume survived due to its Retain policy. Restore the database by rebinding the existing PV without losing any data.
Observe the Delete and Retain reclaim policies in action, recover a Released PV by patching claimRef, and recover data by creating a new PV pointing to the same storage directory.
Explore how the DefaultStorageClass admission controller injects storage classes, explicitly name a StorageClass, switch the cluster default, and inspect where local-path stores volumes on the node.
Learn the three static PV binding patterns - generic match, label selector, and bidirectional claimRef - then use a no-provisioner StorageClass with WaitForFirstConsumer to pin storage to a specific node.
Create a PersistentVolumeClaim backed by a CSI StorageClass and run a storage performance benchmark using FIO inside a Kubernetes Job.
A production deployment is stuck in Pending because its PersistentVolumeClaim and StorageClass are missing. Set up NFS-backed storage and watch all pods come alive and write shared data across nodes.
Create a PersistentVolume backed by local storage that can be used only on a specific node, and bind it to a PersistentVolumeClaim using label selectors.
