No cloud account required. One cluster built locally with kind carries you through Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, PVCs, probes, Ingress, StatefulSets, RBAC and Kustomize across twenty lessons. A single task-management API grows from lesson 3 to the end, and you cause the failures yourself.
The 20 lessons are grouped into five chapters, and taking them in order is the best way. The application you build in lesson 3 stays with you until lesson 20, so the series makes most sense read straight through. Note: kubectl cannot run inside the browser. Use the kind cluster you create in lesson 1 — anywhere Docker runs will do.
What it means to "declare the desired state". Creating a cluster with kind, running a Pod with kubectl, and getting your own image onto the cluster. From here on it is the same application throughout.
You stop creating Pods by hand. A Deployment that recreates what dies, a Service that spreads traffic across what multiplies, and the labels and selectors tying the two together. This is where the wiring becomes visible.
Where the things that must not be baked into an image belong. ConfigMaps and Secrets, when an emptyDir disappears, persistence with a PersistentVolumeClaim, and dividing things up with Namespaces and capping them.
Probes that take a broken Pod out of rotation, the QoS class and HPA that requests and limits decide, rolling updates and rollbacks that swap versions without downtime, exposure through Ingress, and Jobs and CronJobs.
StatefulSets for things that hold state, ServiceAccounts and RBAC to narrow permissions, and Kustomize to fold away per-environment differences. It closes with troubleshooting: working back from STATUS to the cause.
Once you have finished all 20 lessons, fill in where it all runs with Cloud Computing for Beginners, and how the images are built with Docker for Beginners. Membership unlocks every course.