Kubernetes Full Course 2026 ☸️ | Zero to Job-Ready 🚀 | Projects + 31 LPA Career Path | Class 4

Summary

The session combined a hands-on Kubernetes deployment and troubleshooting lesson with a live experiment in channel marketing and student recruitment.

Business, Marketing, and Recruitment

• Thumbnail A/B test: The instructor changed the video thumbnail to feature a woman, aiming to compare its reach with a typical baseline of about 2,000 views. During the stream, he cited changing hourly view counts—roughly 850–1,100, later around 1,500, and at one point 3,200. These were provisional live figures, not a completed test result.
• Engagement incentive: The instructor jokingly tied hiring a female instructor to reaching 10,000 subscribers. The stream celebrated passing 9,000, but did not report reaching 10,000.
• Training recruitment: The channel promoted a free November training batch and directed interested learners to register through a form or contact WhatsApp. The instructor emphasized commitment: applicants should be prepared to study 10–12 hours daily, or at least 5–6 hours if working.
• Placement and package claims: The instructor cited 95 offers in 2026 and an average package of 30.72 LPA, while noting that the figures might need checking. He also cited 44 students placed in 2025, with an average package of 27 LPA. These are presenter-reported promotional figures and were not independently verified in the subtitles.

Frameworks, Processes, and Playbooks

Infrastructure and Application Deployment

• Infrastructure provisioning: The instructor demonstrated creating an EKS/Kubernetes cluster with Terraform using terraform apply, describing it as a largely one-command setup. He also discussed using separate node groups with different instance types and properties.
• Production-style organization: Applications and supporting components were separated into Kubernetes namespaces. Examples included namespaces for the cluster autoscaler, external DNS, and Istio-related components.
• Application deployment workflow: Create the namespace first, then deploy the application and expose it through a Kubernetes Service. A workload cannot be deployed into a namespace that does not exist.

Traffic Routing

The lesson traced traffic through the following path:

Browser → AWS load balancer → Istio ingress gateway → VirtualService → Kubernetes Service → application pods

A single load balancer and gateway can route traffic to multiple applications using different URL paths, reducing the need for a separate load balancer for each application.

Troubleshooting Checklist

The instructor recommended checking:

1. Whether the pods and application are running and healthy.
2. Deployment and pod logs.
3. Service configuration and endpoints.
4. Gateway and VirtualService routing resources.
5. Load-balancer and security-group settings.
6. Port mappings, labels, and selectors.
7. Local connectivity using port-forwarding and command-line tests such as curl.

Incident Documentation

After diagnosing the issue, the instructor created a root-cause analysis (RCA) record and recommended using a 5 Whys analysis. Documentation should capture the incident, checks performed, root cause, resolution, and prevention steps. This can support operational handoffs and interview preparation.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

The class distinguished between keeping a service running through redundant components and restoring service after a major disruption. It also introduced:

• RTO: How quickly service must be restored.
• RPO: How much data loss is acceptable.

Technical Case Study

An application’s pods and internal service appeared healthy, and the AWS load balancer was reachable, but browser requests were not reaching the application. The investigation found that the required Istio Gateway and VirtualService routing configuration had not been created.

Adding those resources enabled traffic to reach the backend. The instructor then demonstrated extending the routing setup to additional applications through separate URL paths.

Presenters and Sources

• Presenter: Neeraj, teaching the live PathNex class.
• Source: PathNex – Shaping Careers live lesson and viewer questions and comments.
• Other troubleshooting aid: ChatGPT was used to help interpret diagnostic output and draft incident documentation.