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 developer named siddhi requires read-only access to specific resources in the production namespace. Create a Role and RoleBinding to grant the minimum required permissions without any write access.
A Deployment is failing because application configuration is missing. Mount only specific keys from an existing ConfigMap as files inside the Pod at the correct path so the application can start successfully.
Use kubectl proxy to open a local, already authenticated HTTP endpoint to the Kubernetes API server, then use curl to list every Secret in the gliese-581 namespace and save the raw JSON response to /home/laborant/secret-list.json.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Create a multi-container Pod with different user IDs per container while sharing a common group ID at the Pod level for collaborative file access.
A deployment is running without health probes or graceful shutdown configuration. Add startup, liveness, and readiness probes plus a preStop hook and terminationGracePeriodSeconds to make it ready for real traffic.