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 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 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.
The application fleet lives inside a private VPC, reachable only through a locked-down bastion that refuses to give you a shell. Find a way to jump through the bastion and place a maintenance lock on two misbehaving servers.
A Deployment is stuck with Pods in ContainerCreating state because the required ConfigMap was not created. Fix the issue to make the application accessible.
Troubleshoot and update a Kubernetes DaemonSet so that its Pods run on all nodes in the cluster, including the control plane.
A new service needs to run in your development environment, but the port it requires is already in use by another app that has to keep working. Diagnose the conflict, free the port without taking the other app down, and get both services running side by side - a realistic exercise in untangling local port conflicts.
A web application is deployed but the website is not accessible. Investigate and fix the issue.
A systemd-managed worker process starts cleanly, prints a few heartbeat lines, then silently vanishes - over and over again. Diagnose why the process keeps dying and stabilize the service.
An image conversion daemon was installed from a vendor package, but it fails to start. Diagnose why the binary cannot be loaded and fix the installation.
A system daemon crashes on startup with a cryptic, non-actionable error message. Investigate the failure, identify its root cause, and get the service running.
