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Kubernetes Troubleshooting for Java & Spring Boot Developers

A hands-on Kubernetes troubleshooting course for Java, Spring Boot, and microservices developers, from first pod to full incident command, beginner to expert.

Overview

This course takes Java and Spring Boot microservice developers from zero Kubernetes operational experience to confident on-call troubleshooting. You already know Java, Spring Boot, and Docker. Here you add the cluster mental model, kubectl diagnostics, probe configuration, JVM debugging inside containers, networking and storage triage, service mesh observability, and the incident-command skills to run a production game day.

Table of Contents

Course Sections

The course is organized into six progressive sections. Getting Started covers setup, Beginner through Expert build troubleshooting depth in stages, and Reference holds standalone lookup material for day-to-day operations.

  1. Getting Started: course overview, prerequisites, local lab setup with kind or minikube, and a tool installation guide for jq, k9s, Istio, JVM tools, and more.
  2. Beginner: core K8s objects, first Spring Boot deploy, reading pod status, resource limits, and a broken-deployment capstone.
  3. Intermediate: probes, exit codes, DNS, config propagation, storage, RBAC, JVM-in-container basics, and an on-call simulation capstone.
  4. Advanced: thread and heap dumps, GC tuning, CPU profiling, service mesh troubleshooting, observability, and a production incident capstone.
  5. Expert: cluster internals, admission webhooks, packet capture, cloud-managed clusters (EKS/GKE/AKS), GitOps, chaos engineering, incident command, and a full game-day capstone.
  6. Reference: command cheat sheet, incident runbook template, hands-on lab ideas, and assessment rubric.

Who This Is For

  • Developers building Spring Boot microservices who get paged when pods crash-loop at 2 a.m.
  • Application-support engineers who need kubectl fluency and JVM diagnostic skills inside containers.
  • Architects evaluating how Java workloads behave on Kubernetes under failure and load.

You should be comfortable with Java, Spring Boot, and basic Docker. No prior Kubernetes operational experience is assumed. The Getting Started section covers lab setup; each later section assumes the ones before it.

Start with the course overview

Welcome: Kubernetes Troubleshooting for Java & Spring Boot Developers

Learn how this course is structured, what you need before you start, and how the four levels build from first pod to full incident command.

Start Kubernetes Course