Review Course Containers Fundamentals (LFS253)

I’ve recently started with the training platform from The Linux Foundation, and my first course has been “Containers Fundamentals (LFS253)“. This is the first out of an unknown number of reviews dedicated to the courses I take from The Linux Foundation.

On all these articles, I’ll write a small review with the highlights I consider important for a professional profile oriented to Tech Leads of teams of Software Engineers that delivers microservice-based systems in Kubernetes platforms. Engage!

Current Background

At the time of having this course, my background already contains knowledge about how to run containers, make my own Dockerfiles to deploy my microservices (Java), and deploy them in a Kubernetes cluster in raw (pure Kubernetes YAML files) and via HELM from a custom Docker registry. I’m able to deploy and configure a Kubernetes cluster for dev purposes.

The Linux Foundation

For those who do not know either The Linux Foundation or their training platform, I’ll introduce both in this section. For those who already know this, you can skip it and go to “the thing” in the next section.

“Empowering generations of open source innovators”

The Linux Foundation tries to provide a neutral, trusted hub for developers to code, manage, and scale open technology projects. From my point of view, it’s an organization that stands one level up to the rest of open-source organizations, at the level of others like Red Hat, for example, to visualize everything around the open-source world. A very ambitious goal.

One of the key initiatives, that this foundation drives, is training. From their platform, The Linux Foundation offers a quite decent training catalog among free courses, paid courses, and certifications.

Some of the most important certifications, that this entity offers, are the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD). Why from my point of view those are important?. Because of the profile I’ve described at the beginning of this article. That knowledge will allow you in your daily-basis working.

“The Thing”, aka The Analysis

The course is distributed in 10 lessons. Each of the lessons has several blocks of information and finishes with Lab Exercises and Knowledge Check.

The Lab Exercises consists of a PDF with exercises to be done via command line (your CLI), based on the learnings from the lesson, and also includes the answers to each of the exercises in case you are not able to get it done. The Knowledge Check consists of a small test to validate your knowledge, which can be repeated infinite times. As a result, you will not have scoring but the feeling of how much you did learn.

At the beginning of the course, the initial lessons talk about the fundamentals of virtualization, not very exciting from my point of view, but important for people with no previous knowledge about this. From there, an important lesson about Container and Container Runtimes. The Container Runtimes is a topic that will be present from now on until the end of the course.

During the rest of the course, we will learn about Container Operations, Images, Storage, and Networking (still a difficult topic). This is the most interesting part for me, mainly when it relates to Container Runtimes that are not Docker (which I already know). The part of the Networking is quite dense and it could be explained better, in my opinion.

As a result of the course, you will be able to get a badge that you could share on social networks, like LinkedIn.

Summary

In summary, there are things I like and others I don’t. I think The Linux Foundation should put more effort to communicate better which course fits better for you, based on your baseline. In my case, most of the topics are well known. I did not require writing the exercises to solve the quizzes and pass them.

I do not like the way of evaluating the progress. A quiz just for “validation” I think it’s not enough. Even more when you are paying money. Such quizzes should be worth it and they should sum up for the certification (in case you make it).

I like the fact that the course talks about not only about Docker. Other container technologies are important, even though we do not adopt them widely.

In conclusion, this course is worth it if you are starting on Containers world. For the profile described at the beginning of this article, it is not worth it, but it’s required to pass some of the certifications.