In the past year, I have done multiple workshops on Kubernetes, Istio, and cloud-native development. As part of my workshops, I usually start with theory and explain the concepts using slides, show some demos, but then it's on you, the participant, to try out the technology yourself. For this purpose, I have created a couple of exercises that guide you through different features and let you see the theory in practice as well. The workshop is targeted for beginners - you don't need to know Kubernetes nor Istio to go through it. If you are already familiar with Kubernetes, you can go through the service mesh portion only.

Workshop outline

Kubernetes basics

1. Installing Kubernetes and the CLI (kubectl)
2. Running containers
3. Accessing services
4. Scaling up/down
5. Config maps and secrets
6. Health checks: liveness, readiness and startup probes
7. Resource quotas

Installing Istio Traffic Management

1. Accessing services through a gateway
2. Splitting traffic
3. Using a service entry

Service Resiliency

1. Dashboards (Grafana, Jaeger, Kiali)
2. Slowing down the services
3. Breaking the services

Security with Istio

1. Using JWT for authentication
2. Enabling RBAC
3. Service accounts

Where to get it?

I open-sourced the material I use during my workshops, and you can get the whole thing here:

• https://github.com/peterj/workshop-material

You can ⭐️ star, ⑂ fork, and send pull requests as I am pretty sure there are typos somewhere.

The workshop is done best when accompanied with the slides (theory):

• Slide deck from one of the workshops I did last year.