Day-2 Operations

Day-2 operations on bare metal Kubernetes clusters are fundamentally different from managed cloud services. There is no “upgrade cluster” button, no auto-replacing failed nodes, no built-in observability stack, and no default registries or pipelines. You own the hardware, the operating system, the control plane, and every component in between.

These modules cover the operational practices that keep on-premises clusters healthy, current, and scalable over multi-year hardware lifecycles. You will learn how to handle node failures, execute zero-downtime upgrades, manage hardware firmware, and build out the essential developer platform services—such as self-hosted CI/CD, image registries, and serverless capabilities—that make bare metal feel like a fully integrated cloud environment.

Modules

Module	Description	Time
Module 7.1: Kubernetes Upgrades on Bare Metal	kubeadm upgrade path, drain strategies, rollback, version skew	60 min
Module 7.2: Hardware Lifecycle & Firmware	BIOS/firmware updates, disk replacement, SMART monitoring, Redfish API	60 min
Module 7.3: Node Failure & Auto-Remediation	Machine Health Checks, node problem detector, automated reboot/reprovision	60 min
Module 7.4: Observability Without Cloud Services	Self-hosted Prometheus + Thanos, Grafana, Loki, IPMI exporter	60 min
Module 7.5: Capacity Expansion & Hardware Refresh	Adding racks, mixed CPU generations, topology spread, refresh cycles	60 min
Self-Hosted CI/CD	Building robust pipeline infrastructure, runners, and GitOps on bare metal	60 min
Self-Hosted Container Registry	Deploying Harbor or similar registries, replication, caching, and vulnerability scanning	60 min
Observability at Scale	Long-term metric retention, high availability logging, and distributed tracing architectures	60 min
Serverless on Bare Metal	Implementing Knative, OpenFaaS, and event-driven architectures without cloud primitives	60 min