Kubernetes from the ground up with kubectl - Knowvember 2025

Installation and setup

Local Kubernetes and build images

Info

Clone repo

git clone https://github.com/olaals/knowvember-2025-kubernetes.git

Navigate to the workdir folder before starting the tasks with

cd workdir

and create all files there

• You can use VS Code or another editor with an integrated terminal,
• or work in a standalone terminal using editors like Vim, Nano, or Emacs.

Tasks

1. Run frontend pod
2. Run frontend deployment
3. Run api deployment
4. Api service
5. Job: service account, role and role binding

Extra tasks

6. Move api to another namespace
7. Api security context

Wrapping up Wrapping up

Application diagram

Blog Frontend

• Serves static assets (JavaScript, HTML, and CSS) at the root path /.
• Proxies all requests under /api to the backend API service.
• Requires an environment variable UPSTREAM_API specifying the base URL of the API service.
• Listens on port 8045

Blog API

• API that interacts with Redis
• Has an env var REDIS_ADDR that defaults to redis:6379
• Can spin up Kubernetes jobs for image processing
• Listens on port 8050

Redis

• In-memory database used for simplicity
• Listens on port 6379

Image Job

• Job for image processing
• Short-lived containers spun up on demand
• Reads and writes to Redis

flowchart LR
  User[User Browser]

  subgraph K8s[Kubernetes Cluster]
    FE[blog-frontend]
    API[blog-api]
    JOB[image-job]
    REDIS[redis]
  end

  User -->|HTTP| FE
  FE -->|Serve html and js| User
  FE -->|HTTP| API
  API -.->|create job| JOB
  API -->|read and write| REDIS
  JOB -->|read and write image| REDIS

Loading

When you are done, it is a good idea to turn off kubernetes mode in docker-desktop again, to have less running in the background.