After watching the GKE Deep Dive course provided by ACloudGuru/Pluralsight, I felt a little disappointed. While I never want to discourage people from publishing content as it helps us all learn, I felt the course should be (re)named to GKE Getting Started.
The course has value, showing general GKE concepts and providing how-to videos, so if you are a GCP novice or a K8s novice, then this course is definitely worth checking out. I found some sections a little more useful than others, so let’s run through them.
Creating and Managing Clusters
This chapter is a basic hands-on tutorial on how to create and manage GKE clusters from the console and CLI. All basic and some “advanced” options are touched on, including scaling, upgrading, and destroying, but I think most people would be able to figure all this out with a little K8s knowledge and 15 minutes of playing around in the console.
Handling Security with Kubernetes Engine
Security was a much more interesting chapter, where user and pod security concepts were discussed and shown in demos while linking them to GCP IAM roles. While nothing advanced is covered here, the general building blocks of security were discussed and I think that allows people to experiment and build the policies and restrictions they want.
Coordinating Networking and Kubernetes Engine
I come from a Networking background, so the discussion around Networking and particularly Load Balancing can be a bit repetitive. Even so, I found this course lightly touched on the subject. If you need to upskill in K8s Networking, then I would recommend reviewing the AWS course that covers Networking concepts in far more depth as suggested by the title Advanced Networking with K8s for AWS.
That said, the course gives a quick overview of how to connect services both externally and internally.
Expanding Kubernetes Engine
There are some excellent topics covered in this section around GKE anywhere and Monitoring. Although it was at this stage I realized the course was from 2018, yikes! I should have realized earlier given some of the discussion points, the number of “new” or “beta” features and the general audio and visual quality.
I blame myself for not doing enough research on the available courses on ACloudGuru, my preferred method of learning. Once I completed the course, I conducted another search and found what I feel is a more suitable and relevant course: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Beginner to Pro. I plan on completing this course in the near future and writing a comparison piece.
Again, by no means do I discourage any content being produced and I did learn a thing or 2 during this course. Still, if I were to repeat my learnings over the last few evenings, then I would have watched the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Beginner to Pro course.