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Practical Work

Labs

Exercises built for real operator muscle: symptoms, evidence, commands, and small reversible fixes. Each lab is a rite—because repetition is how doctrine becomes skill.

Begin with FoundationsTroubleshooting AtlasShrine Archive

How to use labs

A protocol that holds under stress.

  1. Read the goal. Know what “done” means.
  2. Run the inspection commands first—before you change anything.
  3. Classify the failure, then apply a single smallest-safe fix.
  4. Verify convergence and record what changed the outcome.

Available labs

10 exercises · practical and copyable

Topic

Showing 10 of 10.

Foundations

Lab

Lab: CrashLoopBackOff Triage

Practice the Order’s first rule of troubleshooting: evidence before action. Diagnose a crash loop using events, logs, exit codes, and probe semantics.

Foundations

Lab

Lab: Fix a Broken Service Selector

Practice service routing fundamentals: selectors, endpoints, and the common ways Services become empty while pods look healthy.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: Ingress Returns 404

Ingress issues are rarely mystical. Debug from the edge inward: controller → ingress rule → service → endpoints → pods.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: DNS Triage Inside the Cluster

DNS failures masquerade as everything. This lab teaches a minimal sequence to prove whether the problem is DNS, routing, policy, or the application.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: RBAC Forbidden Triage

RBAC errors are deterministic. This lab teaches you to prove identity, scope, and verb/resource, then fix the binding without over-granting.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: Rollout Stalled (ProgressDeadlineExceeded)

Practice rollout discipline under pressure: treat the rollout as a control loop with gates, and restore forward motion without destroying attribution.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: Pending Pods (Scheduling Constraints)

Practice reading scheduler testimony. Pending is placement failure—solve the constraint, not the symptom.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: PVC Pending (Provisioning Discipline)

Storage issues are slow, expensive, and unforgiving. Practice reading PVC events and fixing provisioning without thrash.

Foundations

Lab

Lab: ConfigMap/Secret Miswire

Practice the discipline of configuration: prove the reference, prove the value, then restart only after the governing mistake is corrected.

Intermediate

Lab

Lab: Probe Semantics Under Load

Probes are not decoration. Practice designing probes that prevent silent outages and avoid restart storms.