Stephen Grider’s Kubernetes and Docker course

I have been spending quite a bit of my extra free time (outside of work) in the area of trying to learn containers, devops, etc.. Within the last 12 months, I’ve taken several Kubernetes courses, Docker courses, Microservices, etc.. Although it has not been “paid experience”, I feel that I have broken the learning curve and could be qualified to be in a group at work using those technologies under the guidance of more experienced individuals fortunate enough to get into using those technologies on the job.

So even tho I took those courses with other authors (which were great courses), I recently noticed that Steven Grider had a course on Docker/Kubernetes too. So I knew I “had” to buy that course based on the React courses I bought where he taught. Those were such great courses that I knew I had to get this course because I wanted to hear how he would teach/explain Docker/Kubernetes. He is a natural born talent when it comes to teaching. He reads your mind and tends to answer a question you may have even before you have a chance to think about asking him the question.

https://www.udemy.com/docker-and-kubernetes-the-complete-guide/

I made a video of a review

About the course, it’s a very aggressive/ambitious course where he teaches you both Docker and Kubernetes. I highly recommend this course “even if you already know Docker or Kubernetes” as he throws in enough valuable “Grider”-isms to help you understand things better.

The course contains 21 hours of video. What that basically means is that if you are working full time and are a “learner of new things off hours”, you should consider planning for it to take a full month (outside of work) or even five weeks. For me, a 1 hour video is never “1 hour” for me to go thru. It’s usually a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio for me depending on the course. He also gives you the chance to learn some additional things along the way like:

– Using Travis CI for continuous integration
– Git (for those unfamiliar with it who maybe have been using TFS or some other version control system)
– Helm (for 3rd party administration)
– Setting up certificates to get HTTPS working
– Setting up/deploying a web application to Google Cloud.

This course will be a tremendous investment in your time but you will learn a lot if you take this course.

Highly recommended.

EKS – Kicking the tires

Before EKS, running Kubernetes on AWS was non trivial as you had to install KOPS, etc.. No, I never tried to install KOPS, etc..

There are a whole bunch of resources now on learning Kubernetes and containers so I did not attempt to really go into any of that in these videos.  The same applies to the concepts of microservices (bounded context, aggregates, etc..) as that’s outside the scope here.  This demo assumes that you have a basic understanding of Kubernetes. My intended audience are those who are familiar with K8 have heard of EKS but never looked at it as well as those who are familiar with K8 and may never have heard of EKS. The end result of the videos is (hopefully) you will walk away with a better understanding of EKS and enough to get you going to try some of the tutorials on your own.

I meant to create 1 video here demonstrating EKS and running a sample program but I kept accidentally ending the recording session so I ended up with 3 videos. I apologize about that. They’re meant to be viewed one after another.

Corrections in the video I need to make: 

I refer to the K8 resource definition files (ie, .yaml) such as deployments, services, etc. as “Cloudformation scripts”.  I am sorry as I did not mean to as those are “resource definition files”.  Doing the videos are hard and I have a lot of respect for instructors who create online courses.  It’s very easy to make mistakes  🙂

 

Some good resources are Amazon’s EKS site, kubernetes.io, etc..

Also, the Stephane Maarek course is a great course to take to get an understanding of EKS. It assumes you already know the basic/intermediate level K8 (Pods, Services, Deployments, Volumes, etc..) and the basics of AWS as it discusses EC2, Loadbalancing, S3, VPC, etc..