Welcome to Kubernetes patterns for application developers. This course will help you expand your knowledge about Kubernetes, particularly what is important for application developers working with Kubernetes. What you will learn will not only be useful for your career, but also preparing you for the certified Kubernetes application developer certification exam. There are some tips included to help you succeed under the high pressure, time limited exam situation. I'm Logan Rakai, and I'll be your trainer for this course.

I'm a content researcher and developer here at Cloud Academy. I have over 10 years of experience in software research and development and I've been working in the cloud since 2012. I'm a certified Kubernetes application developer and a certified Kubernetes administrator. I have also been involved with software development since 2007. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter. This course is intended for application developers that are leveraging containers and using, or considering using Kubernetes as a platform for deploying applications but many parts of this course, appeal to a broader audience of Kubernetes users. Some of the individuals that may benefit from taking this course include, application developers, DevOps engineers, software testers, and Kubernetes certification examinees.

This course will help you succeed in designing, building, and configuring cloud native applications for Kubernetes. The lessons aim to prepare you for the certified Kubernetes application developer exam and therefore focus on specific patterns in Kubernetes, rather than writing application code. This course has lessons covering the following topics. The first lesson we'll teach you several multi-container patterns for Kubernetes pods. You'll understand why pods allow for multiple containers and patterns that make the most out of having multiple containers in a pod.

After that we'll cover several networking concepts in Kubernetes. You will learn how to control internal and external access to applications running in a Kubernetes cluster. Next, you will learn about service accounts for Kubernetes. Service accounts provide a mechanism for pods to authenticate themselves in the cluster. You will understand why you might need service accounts and how to configure them. The last lesson focuses on showing you different ways to leverage kubectl, the command line tool for working with Kubernetes. What you learn here will be useful for certification exams and for boosting your productivity at the command line when working with Kubernetes. Other topics important to application developers such as pod design and observability are the subject of several labs here on Cloud Academy. Some topics really are learned best in the hands on environments provided by our labs. I strongly encourage you to try the Kubernetes labs after taking this course. To get the most out of this course, you should know about Core Kubernetes resources, including pods and deployments. 

You should have some experience with the kube control command line tool for working with Kubernetes. You will also benefit from understanding the YAML and JSON file formats. You probably already have this skill if you have the prior too. When you work with Kubernetes, it won't take long until YAML files make an appearance. If you're not sure if you meet all these pre-requisites, I'd highly recommend you go through the introduction to Kubernetes course, here on Cloud Academy. Before taking this course, you can follow along with the course examples and I'd encourage you to. You can use whatever Kubernetes cluster you have access to including clusters you can run locally, for example using Docker Desktop for Mac or Windows, or MiniKube. 

I've put the resources that I use for the demos of this course on Cloud Academy's GitHub account under the Kubernetes patterns for application developers repository. I'm happy to hear from you and I make content for you and I want it to be as good as it can be. Please give the course a rating, please give the course a rating and send along your feedback when you're finished. And with that, it's time to start learning about Kubernetes patterns for application developers. Start the next lesson when you're ready.