Kubernetes Troubleshooting Course for Java Developers Beginner to Expert

Who this course is for

You’re a Java or Spring Boot developer. You build microservices. Your team runs them on Kubernetes, and when something breaks at 2 a.m., you’re the one who gets paged, not a dedicated platform team. This course exists because most Kubernetes material is written for infrastructure engineers, not for the person who actually wrote the @RestController that’s now returning 503s.

No prior Kubernetes operational experience is assumed. Docker familiarity and comfortable Java/Spring Boot development are the only prerequisites: see Prerequisites for cluster setup and Tool Installation Guide for progressive tool installs.

How the course is structured

The course has four levels. Each one builds on the last, don’t skip ahead, because later levels assume the muscle memory from earlier labs, not just the reading.

flowchart LR
    A[Beginner] --> B[Intermediate]
    B --> C[Advanced]
    C --> D[Expert / On-Call Ready]

    A -.->|"Core objects,\nfirst deploy,\nread pod status"| A1[" "]
    B -.->|"Probes, DNS,\nJVM basics,\nRBAC"| B1[" "]
    C -.->|"Thread/heap dumps,\nservice mesh,\nobservability"| C1[" "]
    D -.->|"Cluster internals,\nchaos engineering,\nincident command"| D1[" "]

    style A1 fill:none,stroke:none
    style B1 fill:none,stroke:none
    style C1 fill:none,stroke:none
    style D1 fill:none,stroke:none

Level	Focus	Est. Duration
Beginner	Core Kubernetes objects, deploying a Spring Boot app, reading pod status	2-3 weeks
Intermediate	Probes, DNS, config propagation, storage, RBAC, JVM-in-container basics	3-4 weeks
Advanced	Thread/heap dumps, GC tuning, service mesh, observability, autoscaling	4-5 weeks
Expert	Cluster internals, low-level networking, chaos engineering, incident command	4-6 weeks

Each lesson follows the same shape:

Prerequisites: what you need to already know, linked directly to the lesson that teaches it.
Core concepts: the mental model, explained once, well.
Commands: copy-pasteable, every flag explained, run against a real lab cluster.
Diagrams: where a picture genuinely beats a paragraph.
Checkpoint: a short self-assessment at the bottom of every page. If you can’t answer it, re-read before moving on.

Standalone reference material, the command cheat sheet, incident runbook template, lab-fault-injection ideas, and the full assessment rubric, lives in the Reference section, separate from the teaching path, so you can jump straight to it once you’re operating day-to-day.

What you’ll be able to do by the end

By the Expert capstone, you should be able to walk into an unannounced production incident, triage it using nothing but kubectl and the observability stack, correctly identify whether the root cause is in your Spring Boot code, the JVM, the cluster, or the network, and communicate that clearly under time pressure.

Checkpoint

I understand the four-level structure and why the order matters.
I know where Reference material lives versus teaching content.
I’m ready to check the Prerequisites page before starting Level 1.

Next:Prerequisites →