Learn the cluster the way it actually thinks.
Kubernetes is Greek for helmsman — the pilot who steers a ship of containers. Work through the belts below: each card opens a deep dive with the mental model, the reason it exists, the gotchas that bite people, and a real manifest. Then take the helm in the Cluster Lab.
Take the helm.
The diagram and the terminal share one living cluster. Type a command and watch Kubernetes reconcile — the scheduler places pods on nodes, controllers heal what you delete. This is the control loop made visible. Try kubectl delete pod <name> and watch it come back.
Spot the bug. Know the why.
Real questions and broken manifests pulled from the mistakes engineers actually make. Answer to reveal the reasoning — every point raises your belt.
Answer the trials below. Correct answers count toward your rank.
Can I do that?
Kubernetes RBAC is allow-only and additive: a subject can act only if some Role or ClusterRole, bound to it, grants the verb on the resource. There are no deny rules. Build a question below and watch the answer — and exactly which binding decides it. Mirrors kubectl auth can-i, which you can also run in the Cluster Lab terminal.