Welcome to DeployStack — Kubernetes CI/CD Mastery.

You just made one of the best investments in your DevOps career. This course takes you from container fundamentals all the way to production-grade GitOps, monitoring, and incident response.

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How This Course Works

8 modules. Sequential progression. Real-world code.

Each lesson includes detailed explanations, production YAML manifests, comparison tables, and hands-on lab exercises. You'll build actual CI/CD pipelines — not toy demos.

The Curriculum

1. Container & Kubernetes Foundations — Docker, K8s architecture, core concepts

2. Core Workloads & Networking — Pods, Services, Ingress, StatefulSets

3. Configuration & Security — ConfigMaps, Secrets, RBAC, Pod Security

4. CI/CD Pipeline Design — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins for K8s

5. Helm Charts & Kustomize — Templating, environment overlays, DRY manifests

6. GitOps with ArgoCD — Declarative deployments, sync policies, multi-cluster

7. Advanced Deployment Strategies — Blue/green, canary, progressive delivery

8. Monitoring & Troubleshooting — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, incident response

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Get the Most Out of This

• Do every lab exercise. Reading YAML is not the same as writing it.

• Use the Community Chat to ask questions, share configs, and help others debug.

• Follow the sequence. Each module builds on the previous one.

• Complete all lessons to earn your certificate of completion.

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Your Environment

You'll need:

• A local Kubernetes cluster (kind, minikube, or k3d)

• kubectl, helm, and docker installed

• A GitHub account (for Actions pipelines)

• A code editor with YAML support

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Let's build something that ships. See you in Module 1.

Every DevOps engineer has been woken up at 3 AM by a failed deployment. After running CI/CD pipelines across hundreds of production clusters, these are the five mistakes I see teams make over and over.

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1. No Resource Requests or Limits

# ❌ This will get scheduled anywhere — and get OOMKilled
containers:
  - name: api
    image: myapp:latest

# ✅ Set explicit boundaries
containers:
  - name: api
    image: myapp:v2.1.0
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 250m
        memory: 256Mi
      limits:
        cpu: 500m
        memory: 512Mi

Without requests, the scheduler has no idea how much capacity your pod needs. Without limits, a memory leak takes down the entire node.

2. Using :latest Tags in Production

The latest tag is mutable. Two deployments with the same manifest can produce completely different behavior. Always pin to immutable tags — commit SHAs or semver.

# Bad
image: myapp:latest

# Good
image: myapp:v2.1.0@sha256:abc123...

3. No Readiness Probes

Without readiness probes, Kubernetes sends traffic to pods that haven't finished starting up. Users hit 502s during every deployment.

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /healthz
    port: 8080
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 10
  failureThreshold: 3

4. Ignoring Pod Disruption Budgets

Rolling updates without PDBs can take all your replicas down simultaneously during node maintenance:

apiVersion: policy/v1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
  name: api-pdb
spec:
  minAvailable: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: api

5. No Rollback Strategy

If your pipeline can deploy but can't rollback, you don't have a pipeline — you have a cannon.

# Always know your rollout history
kubectl rollout history deployment/api

# One command rollback
kubectl rollout undo deployment/api

Better yet, use GitOps with ArgoCD — rollbacks become a simple git revert.

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These five patterns are covered in depth (with hands-on labs) in the full Kubernetes CI/CD Mastery course here on DeployStack. The course covers everything from container basics to production-grade GitOps, monitoring, and incident response.

If you're shipping to Kubernetes, you need to know this stuff. 🚀