Marcus Noble

Changelog

2026-05-23: Added iximiuz Labs, Cloud Native Days and CloudNative.Now

2024-06-24: Added links to video channels DevOpsToolkit, You Choose and Enlightning. Added link to KubeHuddle conference.

Recently, a friend of mine asked me what resources I'd recommend to start learning about Kubernetes. He was a victim of the layoffs that seem to be so prevalent right now and has experience as a classic SysOps / SysAdmin engineer but no expose to Kubernetes yet and wanted to learn to help improve his job-hunting prospects.

I wasn't sure what to recommend at first, it's been a long time since I was learning Kubernetes for the first time and wasn't sure what was still useful and relevant but what follows is what I ended up sharing with him, and now with all of you.

If you have suggestions for more resources to include here please reach out to me on Mastodon at @Marcus@k8s.social!

(I have also previously wrote about my recommended Go resources which also might be of interest.)

📚 Books

• The Kubernetes Book by Nigel Poulton
• Docker Deep Dive by Nigel Poulton (if you also need to get up to speed with Docker / Containers)
• Quick Start Kubernetes by Nigel Poulton
• Understanding Kubernetes in a visual way by Aurélie Vache
• The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes - don't let its child-focussed format fool you, this is a great (free) book! And theres a whole series of books on related topics available.

The following might not be quite beginner friendly and should be picked up after you understand the basics:

• Kubernetes Best Practices by Brendan Burns, Eddie Villalba, Dave Strebel & Lachlan Evenson
• Kubernetes Patterns by by Bilgin Ibryam, Roland Huβ Ph.d.

🧰 Services, Tools and Libraries

• Civo - you can get $250 worth of credit when you sign up to play with their managed Kubernetes offerings.
• Kind - local testing / experimenting with Kubernetes running inside a container.
• Talos - My favourite OS for running Kubernetes on. This is what powers my homelab cluster.
• k3s - a great, lightweight Kubernetes distrobution that you can even run on a Raspberry Pi!
• k9s - an interactive terminal tool for working with a Kubernetes cluster

🔗 Websites / Blog Posts / Tutorials

• Official Kubernetes tutorials
• iximiuz Labs - Hands-on tutorials, courses and challenges with an interactive Kubernetes environment for you to use all in the browser.
  • If you want a real deep dive my buddy Márk has built as course: Kubernetes the (Very) Hard Way
• Civo Learn - Tutorials
• Civo Academy - A series of workshops to help beginners learn Kubernetes
• Kube Academy from VMWare has a lot of tutorials to follow
• Pluralsight - if you have a subscription there's several good classes on here related to Kubernetes. I can recommend the ones by Nigel Poulton.
• I've previously written a blog post, Managing Kubernetes without losing your cool, that has some tools and tips I recommend for everyone working with Kubernetes.

📺 Videos

• Rawkode Academy - David covers more than just Kubernetes and has a lot of useful videos about all things cloud native (and more)!
• Kunal Kushwaha - Kunal is a powerhouse when it comes to making super helpful videos. There a lot of stuff here, not just Kubernetes.
• Anaïs Urlichs - Lots of great, beginner friendly video about Kubernetes and related tools. Specifically the Full Kubernetes tutorial on Docker, KinD, kubectl, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana which might be helpful.
• CNCF - Collections of conference talks from previous KubeCon, Kubernetes Community Days and other conferences.
• DevOpsToolkit - Viktor is great at introducing complex topics in an approachable way
• You Choose - a series of videos going through lots of the CNCF Landscape tools and pitting them against each other.
• Enlightning - Whitney does a great job of going through lots of CNCF technologies with the help of her lightboard.

📽️ Conferences

• KubeCon + CloudnativeCon is great for meeting people in the community if you have a chance to attend. There are events available in North America, Europe, China and India
• I'm a huge fan of Kubernetes Community Days! These are smaller, local Kubernetes conferences hosted all over the world.
• There's also various Cloud Native Days around the world that are similar to KCDs and very community focussed.
• Cloud Native Rejekts is recent favourite of mine and is set up as the "b-side" conference to KubeCon. This great, community focussed conference runs for 2 days before the main KubeCon conference.
• KubeHuddle - a wonderful community focussed conference

📰 Newsletters

• KubeWeekly from CNCF
• CloudNative.Now - This is my monthly newsletter where I do a roundup of everything going on in the cloud native space in the past month. Lots of Kubernetes resources show up in here.

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Hopefully these are helpful for someone! I'd love to hear what your favourite resources are, let me know on Mastodon at @Marcus@k8s.social!