Are you tired of wasting time and energy manually deploying and managing your applications across various servers and environments? Do you wish there was an easier and more efficient way to handle these tasks? If so, then Kubernetes might be the solution for you, just as it was the solution for 61% of organizations.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Whether you’re running traditional monolithic applications or microservices, Kubernetes can help you automate the deployment and management process across any infrastructure, whether it be on-premises, or cloud, or both (hybrid).

Read on more to find my top picks for the best Kubernetes course.

Click on the shortcuts for more details:

• Top Picks
• What is Kubernetes?
• Why You Should Trust Us
• Courses Overview
• How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them

Here are our top picks

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What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (also known as “K8s”) is an open-source container orchestration platform that was first developed by Google in 2014. Google had always used Docker containers to help squeeze every ounce of performance out of their servers to power intensive online services like Google Search and YouTube. To manage their rapidly growing number of clusters, Google built Borg (the predecessor of Kubernetes) to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Borg did this by providing a set of APIs and tools to help the developer define the desired state of applications. Once that’s done, Borg will handle the rest automatically. This means developers can focus on building and improving applications, rather than worrying about the technicalities of deployment and management, while operations teams can easily ensure the reliability and performance of their applications.

Realizing the potential for this technology to become the industry-standard for managing containerized applications (and to indirectly monetize from it with their cloud services), Google released Kubernetes as a free and open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help speed up adoption and development. And it worked! Kubernetes is now the de-facto standard for container orchestration, with 61% of organizations in 2022 using Kubernetes to streamline the management of their containerized applications.

Over the years, Kubernetes has continued to evolve and expand, with new features and capabilities being added to meet the needs of a growing user base. Although Google Kubernetes Engine makes up a significant portion of container tools, there are other alternatives that extend upon Kubernetes like Amazon ECS, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Red Hat OpenShift.

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023, Kubernetes is used by just under 20% of developers and DevOps engineers. The 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report confirms that there is high demand for cloud and container technology as agreed by approximately 70% of hiring managers and IT experts. The salary reflects the demand, with Kubernetes engineers making an average of $124,000 a year according to Payscale, which is well above what the average software engineer makes. Learning Kubernetes is a useful skill for any DevOps engineer, so learn Kubernetes if you plan to become one!

Why You Should Trust Us

Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 60 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 200,000 online courses and 200,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.

Courses Overview

• Over 2.8K people are following 2.200+ Kubernetes Courses on Class Central
• All except one of the courses require knowledge of containers (like Docker)
• Seven of the courses are free, free to audit, or have free trial, whereas two are paid
• Five of the courses are suitable for beginners, while two are for intermediates and another two more are for experienced developers.

Best free introductory Kubernetes Course (TechWorld with Nana)

Kubernetes Tutorial for Beginners effectively balances theoretical and practical info in just 4 hours. Through the use of clear visuals and hands-on examples, Nana distills hard-to-understand concepts into the simplest of forms.

By the end of this course, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Kubernete components and architecture, and be able to use it to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Take this course, you’ll need to know what containers are. If you don’t, but want a course that teaches both Dockers and Kubernetes, take a look at the third pick in this guide.

In this course:

• Learn main parts of Kubernetes: Nodes, Pods, and Services
• Understand how these components fit into Kubernetes architecture
• Set up Kubernetes on your local machine using Minikube and Kubectl
• Perform common tasks: manage Pods, deployments, and debug issues
• Organize multiple Kubernetes objects using namespaces and YAML files
• Learn how namespaces manage groups of objects, and YAML defines and creates them
• Use ingresses to expose services externally
• Deploy applications with Helm, a Kubernetes package manager
• Dive deeper into persistent volumes/claims for data storage
• Explore stateful sets for deploying stateful applications
• Understand different types of Kubernetes services and how to choose them.

Best Free Beginner to Advanced University Course (University of Helsinki)

For a free open-source introductory course to Kubernetes with K3s and GKE, written by a web developer for web developers, look no further than DevOps with Kubernetes from the University of Helsinki. You’ll develop software with a microservice architecture that utilizes Kubernetes to serve software that scales and deploys automatically, while managing it all. This course provides a free certificate of completion for anyone who completes all the exercises.

Having a community of developers to rely on when you face problems is crucial when learning, and luckily this course has its own Discord channel that anyone is free to join to ask questions.

To take this course, you should be familiar with containers, be able to independently develop web software, have knowledge of SQL databases, and know the basics of networking.

What you’ll learn:

• Start by creating and running a Kubernetes cluster locally with k3d and deploying a simple microservice
• Study Kubernetes internals: debugging, networking, and storage
• Focus on managing clusters: Pod communication, resource grouping/labeling, fine-tuning with configuration files, StatefulSets, Jobs, and performance monitoring
• Explore cloud options like Google Kubernetes Engine for deployment
• Learn to create deployment pipelines, enable continuous delivery, choose update strategies, and use Prometheus for monitoring
• Practice GitOps for application management using Git as the source of truth
• Explore Kubernetes web development best practices: define custom resources and use a service mesh for traffic control.
• End by exploring platforms that extend Kubernetes functionality: OpenShift and Knative.

This course is equivalent to 5 ECTS credits for University of Helsinki Students. To complete the course and get a certificate, you must submit solutions for all of the exercises in parts 1–5. There is no final exam for this course.

Best Free Hands-on Course if You Don’t Know Containers (KubeAcademy)

The next pick for the best course to learn Kubernetes is KubeAcademy’s Kubernetes Core Concepts Learning Path.

This free learning path is much more hands-on than the above two picks in this guide, with virtual labs and exercises. You’ll learn how to containerize with Docker and deploy a Kubernetes application, manage application lifecycle and configuration, networking considerations, workload options, and security.

No knowledge of containers or Kubernetes is required to take this course.

Syllabus:

• Begin with an introduction to containers using Docker for consistent application deployment and management
• Learn Kubernetes fundamentals for deploying and managing multiple applications across containers
• Understand cloud-native infrastructure, development lifecycle, and application configuration with Pods and Containers
• Study cluster concepts for running multiple applications in a single Kubernetes cluster
• Explore networking and traffic management to ensure proper user access
• Learn how to handle persistent storage, environment-specific configurations, and other application requirements
• Cover different Kubernetes workloads and security considerations for each.

Best Free Concise Developer-Focused Video (Bogdan Stashchuk)

Kubernetes Course – Full Beginners Tutorial is more developer-focused than the 1st course in this guide, focusing more on the practical than technical aspects (which is why it is also quite short). By the end, you’ll be able to set up Kubernetes for your projects.

Prerequisites for this course include basic knowledge of containerization and experience with the Docker command-line tool.

In this course:

• Start by learning key Kubernetes features, terminology, and cluster structure (Nodes, Pods)
• Understand how Kubernetes deploys and manages containerized applications
• Install and set up kubectl and minikube to run a single-node Kubernetes cluster
• Build a local Kubernetes cluster, scale deployments, and perform rolling updates
• Build a custom Docker image, push it to Docker Hub, and create a Kubernetes deployment from it
• Create services and deployments in Kubernetes using YAML configuration files
• Learn to connect different deployments together
• Change the container runtime from Docker to CRI-O and deploy applications using CRI-O.

freeCodeCamp offers many other courses on various programming languages on their YouTube channel as well as on their website. Bogdan Stashchuk is a software developer and DevOps engineer that creates courses and tutorials on his YouTube channel and Udemy. Over 1M+ students have enrolled in his courses.

Best Lab-Based Course to Practice  Kubernetes (A Cloud Guru)

Learn Kubernetes by Doing is a paid course jam-packed with hands-on labs and exercises to help you gain experience with Kubernetes for real-world usage. You’ll practice real-world scenarios in real cloud environments.

To be successful in this course, you should have a basic understanding of the Linux operating system, including system administrator concepts and containers.

What you’ll learn:

• Kubernetes basics: set up a local development environment, deploy a simple service, and a microservice application
• Cluster components: learn how Kubernetes components work together; manage applications post-deployment with tools like kubectl
• Kubernetes theory: explore service discovery, communication, scheduling, lifecycle management, failure handling, and security with ClusterRole
• Persistent storage: understand and implement persistent storage in Kubernetes
• Testing and monitoring: cover integration, end-to-end testing, and performance monitoring/logging for your Kubernetes cluster
• Advanced techniques: learn to manually set up and manage a Kubernetes cluster through bootstrapping and other methods (“doing things the hard way”).

Best Free Course for Linux Users (Linux Foundation)

If Linux is your beloved operating system, you’ll love Introduction to Kubernetes, that covers both basic and advanced concepts of Kubernetes architecture.

This free-to-audit course teaches you how to deploy stand-alone and multi-tier applications, which will involve ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Ingress. Upon completion, you’ll have a solid understanding of Kubernetes and be able to begin using it to implement cloud native patterns.

You’ll need basic knowledge of Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) and container technology like Docker and rkt. If you’re paying for the certificate, you’ll have access to the graded knowledge checks (quizzes) and the final exam that you’ll have to complete to obtain your certificate.

In this course:

• Explore the shift from monoliths to microservices and the role of Kubernetes in container orchestration
• Learn about the architecture, primary components, and building blocks of Kubernetes
• Set up and access a Kubernetes cluster using Minikube
• Understand running and accessing applications, including security (authentication, authorization), services, ingresses, ConfigMaps, and Secrets
• Discover advanced features like multi-node pod controllers, stateful application controllers, and batch controllers
• Learn about Kubernetes communities and how to get involved.

The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes the use and development of open source software, with a focus on the Linux operating system. It provides resources and support for individuals and companies involved in open source projects, including training, certification programs, and conferences.

Best Advanced Kubernetes Course with Minimal Abstractions (A Cloud Guru)

Kubernetes bootstrapping is usually done with the use of installers or scripts like kubeadm.

But to get a deeper understanding of how Kubernetes works and how it can be deployed in a production environment, the Kubernetes the Hard Way course ditches all of that in favor of doing it manually. In the process, you’ll be able to troubleshoot even the most obscure of issues that may arise when deploying it in a production environment.

Prior knowledge of Kubernetes is required for this paid course.

You’ll cover in this course:

• Provisioning the CA and Generating TLS Certificates
• Generating Kubernetes Configuration Files for Authentication
• Generating the Data Encryption Config and Key
• Bootstrapping the etcd Cluster, Kubernetes Control Plane, and Kubernetes Worker Nodes
• Configuring kubectl for Remote Access
• Networking
• Deploying the DNS Cluster Add-on
• Smoke Test.

You’ll learn by watching the video tutorials and more significantly, through hands-on, practical learning experience by completing the virtual labs.

Best PluralSight Kubernetes Course for Beginners (Dan Wahlin)

Kubernetes for Developers: Core Concepts teaches developers the fundamental concepts of Kubernetes and how to use it to deploy and manage applications in a reliable and scalable way.

In this paid course with free trial, you will learn about key Kubernetes resources, the benefits they offer, and how to get started using them effectively. By the end of this course, you will have a solid understanding of how to use Kubernetes to manage and orchestrate your containers.

You’ll need to know what containers are to take this course.

What you’ll learn:

• Overview of Kubernetes, its components, and developer use cases
• Set up Kubernetes locally and interact with it using kubectl
• Key resources: learn about Pods, deployments, and services to host and expose applications
• Configuration management: explore ConfigMaps and Secrets for managing configuration data and sensitive information
• Learn how to troubleshoot Pods
• Application deployment: integrate concepts to deploy an application in a Kubernetes cluster.

Best Course to Prepare for Kubernetes Certification (KodeKloud Training)

If you’re planning on taking the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification exam to demonstrate your hands-on skills and expert knowledge of Kubernetes, you’ll need a lot of practice.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests is here to help you with that. This paid course focuses on advanced topics on Kubernetes and in-depth discussion into the various concepts around deploying a high availability cluster for a production use case, understanding more about scheduling, monitoring, maintenance, securities, storage, and troubleshooting.

You’ll also have access to a community Slack channel where you can interact with the instructors and other students. The course is also constantly updated to keep up with CKA exam’s quarterly updates. KodeKloud Training is a CNCF certified Kubernetes training partner.

To take this course, you’ll need a basic understanding of Docker and YAML.

What you’ll learn:

• Core concepts of cluster architecture: Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments, and services
• Scheduling: including manual scheduling, DaemonSets, labels and selectors, resource requests and limits, and configuring multiple schedulers
• Logging and monitoring: options for the Kubernetes cluster and applications hosted on them, and how to view and manage the logs.
• Application lifecycle management: rolling updates, rollbacks, configuring applications, scaling applications, and health checks
• Cluster maintenance: operating system upgrades, cluster upgrades, best practices for upgrading, disaster recovery, and backup and restore methodologies
• Kubernetes security primitives: authentication mechanisms, TLS certificates, and securing various components within the cluster
• Networking: pod networking, service networking, and ingress networking
• Working with persistent storage: types of persistent storage, attaching persistent storage to applications, and configuring persistent storage for applications
• Troubleshooting: techniques for application, control plane, worker node, and network issues and failures.
• Advanced topics in Kubernetes: custom controllers, custom resource definitions, operator frameworks, among others.

The course provides hundreds of coding exercises where you can practice solving Kubernetes coding challenges in live lab environments directly in your browser. Hints and solutions are provided, and your work will be immediately validated and receive feedback.

KodeKloud Training also offers other courses on Kubernetes:

• Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners – Hands-on is for beginners with no experience with containers or container orchestration
• Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) with Tests is for application developers who are looking to learn how to design, build, and configure cloud native applications.

How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them

I built this article following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 200K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 2800 Kubernetes courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable, engaging content and fit in a set of criteria: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Pat revised the research and the latest version of this article.