Passing Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification exam

For some time ago I successfully passed a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification exam from CNCF and The Linux Foundation, and in this blog post I would like to share a few resources I鈥檝e used for preparation, as well as a few personal experiences from the certification exam and format, that I hope can be useful for others who are getting ready for the exam 馃樅 What is KCNA? Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) is one of the beginner-level certifications that verifies your fundamental knowledge of cloud native technologies. Significant part of the certification is dedicated to Kubernetes, its architecture and core components, but it also covers areas like containerization, GitOps and fundamental cloud native security. ...

November 5, 2023 路 6 min 路 Kristina Devochko

A bird's-eye view of upcoming KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2023

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 is under a week away and I thought I would use this opportunity to share some of the personal reflections for the upcoming event, as well as highlight some of the sessions that I personally am looking forward to watching. Myself and Michael have also chatted about the event at Kubernetes Unpacked podcast - do check out this episode as well: Prepping For KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2023. ...

November 3, 2023 路 8 min 路 Kristina Devochko

Resilience testing of Azure services with Azure Chaos Studio

This blog post is a contribution to Azure Back to School - an annual community event taking place in September. For the Community by the Community, during the whole month of September, contributors share their knowledge and experience about Azure. You鈥檙e welcome to check out all the contributions here: 2023 Azure Back to School Session Schedule Introduction Chaos engineering has been known to the tech industry for quite many years now, but it has gained significant popularity and wider adoption during the last few years. There are good reasons for why this acceleration has happened. If we take a look at a modern software development landscape we will see that we鈥檙e steadily building more complex, distributed systems and applications, with hundreds or even thousands of dependencies and interconnections. Ensuring that all of these bits and pieces play nicely together to provide availability, stability and security of our systems at all times is a challenge that鈥檚 not for the faint-hearted. ...

September 21, 2023 路 10 min 路 Kristina Devochko

Kubernetes port forwarding: cleaning up orphaned ports

Introduction When working with Kubernetes there may be cases where you may need to use port forwarding to get access to an application running inside the cluster. Some of the use cases may be: accessing information in internal applications that are not meant to be exposed for public access verifying that the application works as expected prior to exposing it for public access troubleshooting purposes Port forwarding is a functionality that is available in Kubernetes via kubectl port-forward command. This command creates a direct connection between the caller (typically a client machine) and the Pod where the application is running inside the cluster. You can either target a specific Pod or any Pod fronted by Kubernetes resources like Service or Deployment. You can read more about the command in official documentation: port-forward. ...

August 11, 2023 路 5 min 路 Kristina Devochko

How to get all Azure Policy assignments of a specific category?

I鈥檝e been in quite a pickle recently: I needed to find out how many and what Azure Policy definitions from Guest Configuration category are currently assigned to my subscription, so that I could understand if any of those policies are applicable to Azure Arc-enabled servers that are residing in the same subscription. Why? Well, because Guest Configuration is a billed functionality, when it comes to Azure Arc. In this case it鈥檚 good to get an overview if any policies related to the billed functionality are enabled in order to further evaluate if you want to use this functionality or not (and therefore disable it to avoid undesired billing). You may also have different use cases for why you would want to retrieve the same information from Azure Policy馃 ...

June 26, 2023 路 2 min 路 Kristina Devochko