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Hectal
Phase 9Advanced10 of 10 in Kubernetes

Production Kubernetes: Health, Resilience & Cluster Operations

Health probes and graceful shutdown done right, disruption budgets and topology spread for resilience, Kustomize for environments, Gateway API for traffic, and the cluster operations every platform team runs: upgrades, drains, and etcd backups.

Phases 0–8 taught every object and tool. This phase is what makes workloads survive real life: deploys, node maintenance, zone failures, and cluster upgrades without users noticing. It's also the operational core of the CKA exam.

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5 topics ~36 min 9 code blocks & diagrams
Start with the first topic
1
9.1

Health Probes & Graceful Shutdown

Readiness decides whether a pod gets traffic, liveness decides whether it gets restarted, startup protects slow starters. Combined with a preStop delay and SIGTERM handling, they make rollouts and scaling invisible to users.

8 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

2
9.2

Disruption Budgets, Topology Spread & Priority

Replicas only protect you if they don't all die together. PodDisruptionBudgets limit voluntary evictions, topology spread keeps replicas across zones and nodes, and priority classes decide who gets evicted when resources run out.

7 min 1 code practice

3
9.3

Kustomize: Environments Without Templates

Kustomize customises plain YAML with overlays and patches instead of templates: one base, small per-environment differences, built into kubectl, and native to Argo CD and Flux.

7 min 2 code practice

4
9.4

Gateway API: The Successor to Ingress

Gateway API splits traffic configuration by role (GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute), supports traffic splitting and header matching natively, and works across implementations, fixing Ingress's annotation sprawl.

7 min 1 code practice

5
9.5

Cluster Operations: Upgrades, Drain/Cordon & etcd Backups

Keeping a cluster healthy over years: cordon and drain nodes for maintenance, upgrade the control plane and nodes one minor version at a time, and back up and restore etcd, the database that holds the entire cluster state.

7 min 1 diagram 2 code practice