Tech Learning Collective

Technology education for radical organizers and revolutionary communities.

  • May 8, 2021 3:30 PM (-0400) – May 8, 2021 5:00 PM
  • Remote
  • Status: CONFIRMED

Tickets are no longer available for this event.

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Event description

Learn to pilot Kubernetes and find out how it helps you get the most value out of your hardware. Kubernetes is the free, enterprise-grade, cloud-native solution for automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. This workshop offers an introduction to container orchestration concepts and practices by showing you how to work effectively with kubectl, utilize Labels and Selectors, explore various components of the Kubernetes control plane, and more. You’ll get your own Kubernetes cluster where you can deploy apps, learn how to influence scheduling decisions, and monitor the health of clustered workloads.

Workshop Description

As anyone who has ever moved house knows, the more effectively you can pack, the easier your move will be. It’s a big task, often requiring thousands of tiny decisions to make sure delicate items are wrapped appropriately, all one’s stuff fits neatly into all the available boxes, and so on. Once the boxes are all packed, loading them onto a moving vehicle requires that you distribute their weight more or less evenly so that there are no unpleasant surprises during the move. This is more or less what container orchestration tools are for, except instead of moving physical bins, we have to ship software inside containers. Each container requires resources, like CPU time and memory space, which means we’ll need to play a sort of Tetris game to make sure all our containers fit in the most dense, yet most balanced, arrangement to keep our hardware costs as low as possible.

Kubernetes is the free and open source industry standard container orchestration platform that provides both system administrators and application developers with a set of tools for cooperatively building, deploying, and maintaining applications at all levels of scale. Its job is to help you get the most out of your hardware by “packing” all your containers (installed server software) into the fewest possible “bins” (physical or virtual machines), and then automatically monitoring, restarting, adding, removing, or shuffling those containers from one machine to another as demand for the services running on your cluster change. Your job is to tell Kubernetes what your ideal deployment situation is, and what to prioritize when resources get scarce.

In this intermediate-level workshop, we’ll build on our knowledge of Linux containers and fundamental system administration tasks to explore a Kubernetes cluster. You’ll learn how to inspect workloads using the kubectl command line utility, a graphical Web-based dashboard, and the Kubernetes API itself. By exploring the Kubernetes control plane, you’ll get insight into how Kubernetes makes scheduling decisions and, along with using Labels and Selectors, you’ll learn how to influence those scheduling decisions by tainting certain resources in specific ways. Finally, you’ll see how Kubernetes provides a set of “cloud-native” services and APIs that developers can use to write apps that spawn more replicas of themselves when needed and perform other forms of automated or self-healing tasks, making the system administrator’s job that much easier.

As this is a remote/online-only event, there is no physical class space, but attendance is still limited to 15 students, so purchase your ticket now to reserve your spot.

To participate in our webinars, you will need access to a modern Web browser such as an up-to-date copy of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. You will also need a reliable Internet connection. We recommend disabling Wi-Fi and plugging your computer in to a hard-wired Ethernet network cable for the duration of the webinar, if possible.

If you would like to share your video screen or appear on camera, you will need to have and activate your own camera, such as the one built-in to many modern laptops. Similarly, to speak with the rest of the webinar participants, you will need a microphone. If you do choose to activate your microphone, we ask that you please plug in headphones/ear buds or use a headset in order to help reduce audio feedback loops that can degrade the webinar experience for other participants.

Please refer to our workshops and webinars FAQ for additional tips and advice before you join the video conference.

As with all Tech Learning Collective events, racism, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, “brogrammer,” “manarchist,” or any kind of similarly awful behavior will result in immediate removal from class without a refund. Please refer to our lightweight social rules for details on our strictly enforced no-tolerance policy against bigotry of any kind.

About Tech Learning Collective

Tech Learning Collective is an apprenticeship-based technology school that trains politically self-motivated individuals in the arts of hypermedia, Information Technology, and radical political practice. We offer unparalleled free, by-donation, and low-cost computer classes on topics ranging from fundamental computer literacy to the same offensive computer hacking techniques used by national intelligence agencies and military powers (cyber armies). For more information and to enroll, visit TechLearningCollective.com.

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