Kubernetes from the Ground Up

These are my notes from studying for the Kubernetes Cloud Native Associate certification — written for clarity, not certification prep.

The Mental Model

Think of Kubernetes as an operating system for your infrastructure. You declare the desired state, and Kubernetes works to make reality match.

Key Concepts

• Pods — one or more containers sharing a network namespace
• Deployments — manage scaling, rolling updates, rollbacks
• Services — stable network endpoints for your pods
• ConfigMaps and Secrets — separate configuration from code

What I Learned

The biggest lesson was understanding when Kubernetes is the right tool and when it's over-engineering. Not every application needs container orchestration.