5 — Taints & Tolerations

Kubernetes

A book-shaped table of contents for Kubernetes: cloud-native foundations, the CKAD/CKA/CKS certification tracks, control-plane internals, platform tooling, multi-cluster architecture, and MAANG-level system design and interview prep — cross-linking the existing Prometheus, Observability, and Platform Engineering chapters instead of duplicating them.

9 — Cluster Lifecycle

Why control-plane and etcd lifecycle, not just worker node churn, is the part of 'cluster lifecycle' most operators under-plan for.

3 — Node Affinity

Why splitting node affinity into required (hard) and preferred (soft) rules lets you express 'must have SSD' and 'prefer us-east' in the same spec.

8 — Node Maintenance

Why cordon-then-drain, not a bare delete, is the only sequence that respects PodDisruptionBudgets while evacuating a node.

2 — nodeSelector

Why nodeSelector's exact-match label equality makes it too blunt for anything beyond simple hardware-tier pinning.