Module 00 · Lesson 03
How to Use This Course
The learn, required and inferno lab stages, and the tooling you need first.
- Work through a topic in the intended learn, required, inferno order.
- Know what the labs provide and what you need yourself.
- Use progress tracking and search on this site.
Three stages, in this order
Every curriculum subdomain has three labs. They are not difficulty settings on the same exercise. They test different things, and doing them out of order wastes the later ones.
Each stage starts from a clean cluster, so wrecking one costs you nothing.
| Stage | What it asks | You are done when |
|---|---|---|
| Learn | Do you understand the control? | You can explain why it works, not just that it did |
| Required | Can you perform it under exam conditions? | You finished without looking anything up beyond the docs |
| Inferno | Can you still perform it when the cluster is lying? | You found the real source of truth before editing anything |
Exam tasks are not always clean. A resource may already exist in a broken state, a manifest may contain a setting that looks relevant and is not, and the obvious file may not be the one in effect. Inferno labs are built from those situations deliberately, so that the first time you meet one is not during the two hours that count.
What you need
The labs run in your browser against a real cluster, so there is nothing to install for those. What you need is the prior knowledge: Kubernetes at CKA level, Linux fundamentals, and enough comfort in a terminal to edit a file over SSH without thinking about the editor.
The exam clock does not pause while you configure aliases. Get into the habit now of
starting with alias k=kubectl, an editor you know, and
export do="--dry-run=client -o yaml" so you can generate a manifest
skeleton in one command instead of typing one from scratch.
Progress, search and navigation
- Every lesson ends with a Mark lesson complete button. It updates the sidebar and the homepage progress ring.
- Press CtrlK, or ⌘K on a Mac, to search every lesson title and heading.
- Progress is stored in your browser with
localStorage. There is no account and nothing is sent anywhere, so it does not follow you between devices. - None of it is required. The course works identically if you never touch it.
You finish the Learn lab for a topic comfortably. What does that tell you about your exam readiness on it?
Learn is designed to be finishable. It builds the model. Required is the first stage that measures anything about exam performance, because it removes the hints and adds the clock.
An Inferno lab shows you a NetworkPolicy manifest in a file that appears to explain the outage. What should you do first?
A file on disk is a claim, not a fact. The applied resource is the source of truth, and Inferno labs are built specifically to punish skipping that check.
Work each topic in order: learn it, perform it under pressure, then survive it broken. Set your shell aliases up before you need them. Progress and search live in your browser only. Module 1 starts the curriculum with Cluster Setup.