217 hands-on Kubernetes labs are live — from your first Pod to MLOps, GitOps & SRE.

Most learning platforms give you very limited videos and quizzes and very few labs with a terminal which disconnects most of the time. We give you a terminal and a problem to solve using your local system.

Every lab on LearnXops:

• Runs inside your system's Docker environment
• Has step-by-step tasks with hints, verification and solutions
• Covers beginner to expert difficulty

🧩 Core Kubernetes (39 labs)

Workloads, objects, scheduling and the kubectl skills everything else builds on.

• Deploy Your First Pod and Inspect It with kubectl — Beginner · 100 pts
• Create a Deployment and Scale It Up and Down — Beginner · 100 pts
• Expose a Deployment with a ClusterIP Service — Beginner · 100 pts
• Expose an App Externally with a NodePort Service — Beginner · 100 pts
• Organize Workloads with Namespaces and Contexts — Beginner · 100 pts
• Roll Out and Roll Back a Deployment Update — Beginner · 100 pts
• Inject Configuration with ConfigMaps — Beginner · 100 pts
• Manage Sensitive Data with Kubernetes Secrets — Beginner · 100 pts
• Label, Select, and Annotate Kubernetes Objects — Beginner · 100 pts
• Run a One-Off Job and a Scheduled CronJob — Beginner · 100 pts
• Share Data Between Containers with emptyDir Volumes — Beginner · 100 pts
• Field Selectors and Advanced kubectl Output (jsonpath, custom-columns) — Beginner · 100 pts
• Run Workloads with ReplicaSets (and Why Deployments Win) — Beginner · 100 pts
• Init Containers: Order Pod Startup with Dependency Checks — Beginner · 100 pts
• Multi-Container Pods with the Sidecar Pattern — Beginner · 100 pts
• Self-Healing Pods with Liveness and Readiness Probes — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Set Resource Requests and Limits (and Trigger an OOMKill) — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Persist Data with PersistentVolumeClaims and StorageClasses — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Run a Stateful Database with a StatefulSet and Headless Service — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Schedule Pods with NodeSelectors, Affinity, and Taints/Tolerations — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Lock Down a Pod with RBAC (ServiceAccount, Role, RoleBinding) — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Restrict Pod-to-Pod Traffic with NetworkPolicies — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Pod Lifecycle Hooks: postStart and preStop — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Native Sidecar Containers with restartPolicy: Always — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Graceful Shutdown with terminationGracePeriodSeconds — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Downward API: Expose Pod Metadata to Containers — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Ephemeral Debug Containers with kubectl debug — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Manage Resources Declaratively with kubectl apply and Kustomize — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Patch Resources with Strategic Merge and JSON Patch — Intermediate · 100 pts
• TTL Controller: Auto-Clean Finished Jobs — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Run a DaemonSet Across All Nodes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Zero-Downtime Rolling Updates with maxSurge / maxUnavailable — Advanced · 100 pts
• Static Pods Managed Directly by the Kubelet — Advanced · 100 pts
• IndexedJob and Parallel Job Completions in Kubernetes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Pod Priority and Preemption with PriorityClasses — Advanced · 100 pts
• Server-Side Apply and Field Management in Kubernetes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Mutate, Validate, and Generate Resources with Kyverno — Advanced · 100 pts
• Spread Workloads with Pod Topology Spread Constraints — Advanced · 100 pts
• Multi-Node Scheduling, Cordon, Drain, and Node Maintenance — Expert · 100 pts

⎈ Helm — Packaging & Releases (10 labs)

Charts, dependencies, hooks, and multi-environment release management.

• Install and Manage an App with Helm Charts — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Helm Chart Dependencies and Subcharts — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Helm Release Lifecycle: Upgrade, Rollback, and History — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Manage Multi-Environment Releases with Helm Values Files — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Test Your Helm Chart with helm test Hooks — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Author Your Own Helm Chart with Values and Templates — Advanced · 100 pts
• Helm Hooks for Pre/Post Install Jobs — Advanced · 100 pts
• Template Logic with Named Templates and _helpers.tpl — Advanced · 100 pts
• Validate Chart Inputs with values.schema.json — Advanced · 100 pts
• Package and Host a Helm Chart Repository — Advanced · 100 pts

🌐 Networking (17 labs)

Services, DNS, Ingress, the Gateway API, NetworkPolicies and service mesh.

• Route HTTP Traffic with an Ingress Controller — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Expose a Service of type LoadBalancer (cloud-provider-kind) — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Headless Services and DNS-Based Service Discovery — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Cluster DNS Deep Dive: CoreDNS, FQDN Resolution, and DNS Debugging — Intermediate · 100 pts
• ExternalName Services: Map In-Cluster Names to External Endpoints — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Path- and Host-Based Routing with a Single Ingress — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Expose Multiple Ingress Hosts with the NGINX Ingress Controller — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Bare-Metal LoadBalancer with MetalLB (L2 Mode) — Intermediate · 100 pts
• TLS Termination at the Ingress with Kubernetes Secrets — Advanced · 100 pts
• EndpointSlices: How Services Track Pod Endpoints — Advanced · 100 pts
• The Gateway API: Routes, Gateways, and GatewayClasses — Advanced · 100 pts
• Default-Deny NetworkPolicies and Egress Control — Advanced · 100 pts
• Zero-Trust mTLS Between Services with Linkerd — Advanced · 100 pts
• Dual-Stack Networking (IPv4/IPv6) on kind — Expert · 100 pts
• Traffic Management with Istio (Sidecar, VirtualService, DestinationRule) — Expert · 100 pts
• Progressive Traffic Shifting and Mirroring with Istio — Expert · 100 pts
• eBPF Networking and Flow Observability with Cilium + Hubble — Expert · 100 pts

💾 Storage & Data (11 labs)

Volumes, PVCs, StatefulSet storage, snapshots, and backup/restore.

• Mount ConfigMaps and Secrets as Volumes (with subPath) — Beginner · 100 pts
• Dynamic Provisioning vs Static PersistentVolumes — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Reclaim Policies: Retain, Delete, and Their Trade-offs — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Projected Volumes: Combine Secrets, ConfigMaps, and Tokens — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Resize a PersistentVolumeClaim Online — Intermediate · 100 pts
• VolumeSnapshots: Back Up and Restore Stateful Data — Advanced · 100 pts
• StatefulSet volumeClaimTemplates and Per-Pod Storage — Advanced · 100 pts
• Local PersistentVolumes and Node-Bound Storage — Advanced · 100 pts
• Back Up and Restore Cluster State with Velero and MinIO — Advanced · 100 pts
• Scheduled Backups and a Disaster-Recovery Drill with Velero — Advanced · 100 pts
• Back Up and Restore etcd with etcdctl Snapshots — Advanced · 100 pts

🔐 Security (24 labs)

RBAC, admission control, Pod Security, secrets, supply-chain and runtime defense.

• ServiceAccount Tokens and Projected Token Volumes — Intermediate · 100 pts
• RBAC ClusterRoles and ClusterRoleBindings Across Namespaces — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Audit Permissions with kubectl auth can-i and Impersonation — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Drop Linux Capabilities and Run as Non-Root — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Image Pull Secrets for Private Registries — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Benchmark Cluster Hardening with kube-bench (CIS) — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Scan Images and Live Workloads for CVEs with Trivy — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Harden Workloads with Pod Security Standards and SecurityContext — Advanced · 100 pts
• Enforce Pod Security Admission at the Namespace Level — Advanced · 100 pts
• Read-Only Root Filesystems and seccomp Profiles — Advanced · 100 pts
• Aggregated ClusterRoles for Extensible Permissions — Advanced · 100 pts
• Bound ServiceAccount Tokens for Workload Identity — Advanced · 100 pts
• Issue and Auto-Renew TLS Certificates with cert-manager — Advanced · 100 pts
• Sync External Secrets with the External Secrets Operator — Advanced · 100 pts
• Inject Secrets at Runtime with HashiCorp Vault Agent — Advanced · 100 pts
• Enforce Policy with OPA Gatekeeper Constraints — Advanced · 100 pts
• Issue a Client Certificate and Build a kubeconfig for a New User — Advanced · 100 pts
• Enable API Server Audit Logging and Trace an Action — Advanced · 100 pts
• Sign Images with cosign and Enforce Signatures at Admission — Advanced · 100 pts
• Detect Runtime Threats with Falco — Advanced · 100 pts
• ValidatingAdmissionPolicy with CEL Expressions — Expert · 100 pts
• Block Workloads with a Validating Admission Webhook — Expert · 100 pts
• Encrypt Secrets at Rest with an EncryptionConfiguration — Expert · 100 pts
• Sandbox Untrusted Workloads with RuntimeClass (gVisor) — Expert · 100 pts

📊 Observability (13 labs)

Logs, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting and SLOs.

• Stream and Aggregate Pod Logs with kubectl — Beginner · 100 pts
• Inspect Cluster State with Events and kubectl describe — Beginner · 100 pts
• Install metrics-server and Read Pod/Node Metrics — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Profile Resource Usage with the Metrics API — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Startup Probes for Slow-Starting Applications — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Deploy Prometheus and Scrape Application Metrics — Advanced · 100 pts
• Visualize Metrics with Grafana Dashboards — Advanced · 100 pts
• Instrument an App with Custom Prometheus Metrics — Advanced · 100 pts
• Alerting Rules with Prometheus Alertmanager — Advanced · 100 pts
• Structured Logging with Fluent Bit to a Sink — Advanced · 100 pts
• Aggregate Logs with Loki and Grafana — Advanced · 100 pts
• Define SLOs with Prometheus and Multi-Window Burn-Rate Alerts — Advanced · 100 pts
• Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry and Jaeger — Expert · 100 pts

🤖 Operators & CRDs (15 labs)

Custom resources, controllers, the Operator SDK and real-world operators.

• Build a Custom Resource and Reconcile It with an Operator (kubebuilder/CRD basics) — Advanced · 100 pts
• Define a CustomResourceDefinition with Validation Schemas — Advanced · 100 pts
• Add Printer Columns and Subresources to a CRD — Advanced · 100 pts
• Finalizers: Clean Up External Resources on Delete — Advanced · 100 pts
• Install an Operator from OperatorHub with OLM — Advanced · 100 pts
• Run a Private Image Registry with Harbor — Advanced · 100 pts
• Isolate Tenants with Virtual Clusters (vcluster) — Advanced · 100 pts
• Attribute Kubernetes Spend with OpenCost — Advanced · 100 pts
• Run Production PostgreSQL with the CloudNativePG Operator — Advanced · 100 pts
• Scaffold an Operator with the Operator SDK — Expert · 100 pts
• Build a Controller with the client-go Informer Pattern — Expert · 100 pts
• CRD Versioning and Conversion Webhooks — Expert · 100 pts
• Implement a Reconcile Loop with Owner References — Expert · 100 pts
• Run Virtual Machines on Kubernetes with KubeVirt — Expert · 100 pts
• Platform Engineering with Crossplane — Expert · 100 pts

🔄 GitOps & Delivery (12 labs)

Argo CD, Flux, progressive delivery, in-cluster CI and developer inner-loop.

• Drift Detection and Reconciliation Fundamentals — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Fast Inner-Loop Development with Skaffold — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Catch Deprecated and Invalid Manifests Before Apply (kubeconform + Pluto) — Intermediate · 100 pts
• GitOps Deploy with Argo CD on kind — Advanced · 100 pts
• Argo CD Auto-Sync and Self-Heal — Advanced · 100 pts
• Argo CD App-of-Apps Pattern — Advanced · 100 pts
• Manage Clusters Declaratively with Flux CD — Advanced · 100 pts
• Flux Helm Releases from Git — Advanced · 100 pts
• Multi-Environment Promotion with Kustomize Overlays in GitOps — Advanced · 100 pts
• Build Container Images In-Cluster with Kaniko — Advanced · 100 pts
• Run a CI Pipeline on Kubernetes with Tekton — Advanced · 100 pts
• Progressive Delivery with Argo Rollouts (Canary) — Expert · 100 pts

📈 Scaling & Capacity (13 labs)

HPA, VPA, KEDA, quotas, autoscaling and right-sizing.

• Resource Quotas and LimitRanges per Namespace — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Protect Availability with PodDisruptionBudgets during a Drain — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Autoscale Workloads with the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler — Advanced · 100 pts
• Blue-Green and Canary Deployments by Hand — Advanced · 100 pts
• HPA with Memory and Multiple Metrics — Advanced · 100 pts
• Tune HPA Behavior with scaleUp/scaleDown Policies — Advanced · 100 pts
• Vertical Pod Autoscaler: Right-Size Your Workloads — Advanced · 100 pts
• Cluster Autoscaling Concepts on kind — Advanced · 100 pts
• Custom Metrics Autoscaling with the Prometheus Adapter — Advanced · 100 pts
• Resize Pod CPU/Memory In-Place Without a Restart — Advanced · 100 pts
• KEDA: Event-Driven Autoscaling from a Queue — Expert · 100 pts
• Rebalance Workloads with the Descheduler — Expert · 100 pts
• Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA): Claim Devices with ResourceClaims — Expert · 100 pts

🔧 Troubleshooting & SRE (15 labs)

Diagnose and recover real failures — crashes, scheduling, DNS, nodes, chaos.

• Resolve ImagePullBackOff and ErrImagePull — Beginner · 100 pts
• Diagnose Pending Pods: Scheduling and Insufficient Resources — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Fix CrashLoopBackOff: Logs, Exit Codes, and Probes — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Debug Service Connectivity: Endpoints, Selectors, and DNS — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Debug RBAC Forbidden Errors — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Investigate OOMKilled and Evicted Pods — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Network Debugging with a netshoot Toolbox Pod — Intermediate · 100 pts
• QoS Classes and the Eviction Order Under Node Pressure — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Debug a Broken Cluster: CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, and Pending Pods — Advanced · 100 pts
• Troubleshoot Failed PVC Binding and Volume Mounts — Advanced · 100 pts
• Recover a Stuck Namespace Termination (Finalizers) — Advanced · 100 pts
• Inject Faults and Test Resilience with Chaos Mesh — Advanced · 100 pts
• Debug a Failing Admission Webhook Blocking All Deployments — Advanced · 100 pts
• Trace Node NotReady and Kubelet Issues — Expert · 100 pts
• Game Day: Diagnose a Multi-Failure Cluster — Expert · 100 pts

🧠 AI / ML / MLOps on Kubernetes (48 labs)

Serving, training, GPUs, pipelines, feature stores, drift, notebooks and cost.

• Serve a scikit-learn Model as a REST API on Kubernetes — Beginner · 100 pts
• Run a Training Job to Completion and Persist the Model — Beginner · 100 pts
• Deploy a FastAPI ML Inference Service and Load-Test It — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Install KServe and Serve a Model with an InferenceService — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Batch (Offline) Inference as a Parallel Kubernetes Job — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Simulate GPU Scheduling on kind with a Fake GPU Device Plugin — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Schedule Periodic Retraining with an Argo CronWorkflow — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Use MinIO as S3-Compatible Storage for Datasets and Models — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Run a Vector Database (Qdrant) on Kubernetes — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Log and Audit Model Predictions in Kubernetes — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Load-Test and Benchmark an Inference Service — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Version Datasets for Reproducible Training — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Provision Per-User Notebook Servers with Resource Limits — Intermediate · 100 pts
• Cache LLM/Embedding Responses to Cut Inference Cost — Intermediate · 100 pts
• KServe Canary Rollout Between Two Model Versions — Advanced · 100 pts
• Serve Multiple Models with Seldon Core — Advanced · 100 pts
• Scale Inference to Zero with KServe + Knative — Advanced · 100 pts
• Triton Inference Server: Multi-Framework Model Serving on Kubernetes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Serve a Small LLM on CPU with llama.cpp (GGUF) — Advanced · 100 pts
• Ray Serve for Online Model Inference on Kubernetes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Model Inference Gateway and Request Routing — Advanced · 100 pts
• Gang-Schedule ML Jobs with the Volcano Scheduler — Advanced · 100 pts
• Checkpoint and Resume Training Across Pod Restarts — Advanced · 100 pts
• Queue and Fair-Share ML Batch Jobs with Kueue — Advanced · 100 pts
• Distributed Data Processing with a Ray Cluster (KubeRay) — Advanced · 100 pts
• Schedule GPU Workloads with the NVIDIA Device Plugin — Advanced · 100 pts
• Monitor GPU Utilization with DCGM Exporter and Grafana — Advanced · 100 pts
• Enforce GPU Quotas and Fair Use per Namespace — Advanced · 100 pts
• Build and Run an ML Pipeline with Argo Workflows — Advanced · 100 pts
• Event-Driven ML Workflows with Argo Events — Advanced · 100 pts
• Serve Online Features with a Feature Store (Feast) on Kubernetes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Track Experiments and Models with MLflow on Kubernetes — Advanced · 100 pts
• Expose Inference Metrics (Latency, Throughput, Tokens) to Prometheus — Advanced · 100 pts
• Run JupyterHub on Kubernetes for Team Notebooks — Advanced · 100 pts
• Multi-Tenant Model Serving with Namespaces and Quotas — Advanced · 100 pts
• Blue-Green Model Deployment with Zero-Downtime Cutover — Advanced · 100 pts
• Rate-Limit and Add Guardrails to an LLM Endpoint — Advanced · 100 pts
• Warm-Pool Inference Pods to Reduce Cold Starts — Advanced · 100 pts
• Autoscale LLM Inference from a Queue with KEDA — Expert · 100 pts
• Distributed PyTorch Training with the Training Operator (PyTorchJob) — Expert · 100 pts
• Distributed TensorFlow with TFJob on Kubernetes — Expert · 100 pts
• Hyperparameter Tuning with Katib on Kubernetes — Expert · 100 pts
• All-Reduce Training with MPIJob and Horovod — Expert · 100 pts
• Fine-Tune a Small Language Model as a Job (LoRA, CPU) — Expert · 100 pts
• Share GPUs with Time-Slicing via the NVIDIA GPU Operator — Expert · 100 pts
• Kubeflow Pipelines: Compile and Run a Pipeline — Expert · 100 pts
• Detect Data and Model Drift on Kubernetes — Expert · 100 pts
• Cost-Aware Bin-Packing for Inference Workloads — Expert · 100 pts

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