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Before you start

Before you start

What You Need

  • A browser. That is genuinely all. Nothing is installed on your computer — not kubectl, not a terminal emulator, not a container runtime.
  • The workspace link and your credentials, which the instructor provides. Your workspace runs in the cloud and you reach it over HTTPS.
  • A second browser tab, or a window you can keep beside your workspace, for this site. The labs refer to pages here constantly.

What You Do Not Need

  • No local installation of anything, and no administrator rights on your own machine.
  • No GitHub account. The course material is served to your workspace without one, and the GitOps session uses a Git server inside the course cluster.
  • No cloud account, and no access to the Azure portal. The infrastructure is provided and managed for you.
  • No Kubernetes cluster of your own — you get one, and it is yours for the week.

The First Thing To Do

Open the terminal in your workspace and run:

labctl env

It checks the things that actually matter: your kubeconfig, whether the cluster answers, what you are allowed to do, and which tools are installed. A healthy environment reports a tick against every line.

If it reports a problem, tell the instructor rather than trying to fix it. Your cluster access is managed centrally; a missing or expired credential is a two-minute fix on their side and a long afternoon of confusion on yours.

What We Assume

You do not need to have run Kubernetes before. You do need to be comfortable with:

  • A terminal. Everything in the labs is done by typing commands, and files are edited as text.
  • YAML, roughly. Enough to recognise indentation that has gone wrong and a list versus a map. We will read a lot of it together.
  • Containers, ideally. If you know what an image and a container are, you will move faster. If not, Day 1 covers it.

If any of that is unfamiliar, say so in the first session rather than the fourth. Nobody minds, and it changes what we slow down on.

Shared and Yours

There are two places you will work, and they have different rules:

  • Your own cluster. Break it as much as you like. Deleting things, exhausting storage, and breaking configurations are the point — you learn more from a cluster you have wrecked and repaired than one you have treated carefully. labctl reset will usually put it back.
  • The shared cluster used for the cloud-integrated exercises. There you have your own namespace and no more, so stay inside it. If you find yourself able to do something destructive outside your namespace, tell the instructor — that is a bug worth knowing about.

Keeping Up

The days are full, and some topics take longer to land than others. Two habits help:

  • Do the labs. Watching someone else drive produces recognition, not skill. Reading a manifest and knowing why each line is there is the whole job.
  • Ask early. During a presentation, or in the lab. If you are unsure what a term means, someone else in the room is too, and they will be grateful you asked.
Your workspace