Apollo11: The Learner's Flight Plan
Welcome to Apollo11. You are going to get to know one application—Apollo Airlines—and use the questions it raises to learn Kubernetes. We begin where a developer normally begins: with containers that work on one machine. Each later stage exists because that earlier arrangement has a specific limitation.
A passenger wants to book a flight. Behind that simple action are processes that must find each other, a reservation that must survive a restart, and a response that needs to arrive before the passenger gives up. As the airline grows, those small requirements become the problems you will solve together.
You can follow the whole journey by reading. When you want to see a mechanism at work, the labs let you build, inspect, break, and recover the same airline on your machine. Start with the explanation, make a prediction, then take the controls when you’re ready.
🛫 Meet Apollo Airlines
The frontend is the passenger’s window into the airline. Behind it, identity looks after the passenger account, flight holds the flight and seat information, booking coordinates the reservation, and notification handles confirmation work. Databases keep the records those services need.
You will return to this application at every stage. When a Pod disappears, ask what happens to the passenger’s booking. When an address changes, ask how another service finds it. When traffic grows, ask where the extra work actually lands.
Meet the airline and follow a passenger’s request →
🧭 Before you board
Bring basic terminal familiarity and an understanding that a browser sends an HTTP request to a server. We will introduce containers, YAML, DNS, storage, signals, and Kubernetes as the story needs them.
Mission briefing sets out the starting point, and How this course works separates the required reading path from the optional lab path. Prepare your launchpad when you want to run the labs; installation can wait until then.
🗺️ Your flight plan
The mission names stay with you throughout the journey. Inside each stage, shorter chapters give you room to understand one relationship at a time. The corresponding lab sits beside those chapters in the sidebar.
| Mission | The question that takes us there |
|---|---|
| Launchpad · Containers | What does it mean to run Apollo Airlines on one machine? |
| Ignition · First Cluster | Who keeps the application running when its pieces move or fail? |
| Stage 1 · Liftoff | A booking Pod disappears. Who replaces it? |
| Stage 2 · Guidance | How does a request find the right service when Pod addresses change? |
| Stage 3 · Mission Data | Which bytes survive when the database Pod is replaced? |
| Stage 4 · Flight Control | When should a service accept work, restart, or leave gracefully? |
| Stage 5 · Payload Integration | How do we ship the next version and recover from a bad change? |
| Stage 6 · Mission Operations | A booking is slow. What can the system tell us about why? |
| Stage 7 · Orbital Maneuvering | More passengers arrive. Which change will actually help? |
| Command Module · Security | Who may change the system, reach a service, or read a credential? |
| Lunar Orbit · Cloud & Recovery | What changes when the same application leaves the local cluster? |
| Capstone · A Passenger’s Booking | Can we bring the whole journey together in one request? |
Launchpad through Stage 7 form the supported local lab path. Command Module and Lunar Orbit teach the concepts behind future missions; their Apollo labs remain planned. Mission Status explains what exists today. Mission Extensions and Towards Mars mark the optional directions beyond the core journey.
🔬 Learn to follow the clues
A command is most useful when you know the question it answers. Before changing anything in a lab, pause and predict what will happen. Afterward, compare the result with your prediction. If they differ, you have something worth investigating.
Apollo’s 5-Rung Evidence Ladder gives those investigations a starting point:
- Snapshot: Which resources exist, and what do they report?
- Events: What has the cluster tried to do?
- Spec and conditions: What was requested, and where has progress stopped?
- Logs: What did the application experience?
- Passenger experience: Can someone complete the request they came to make?
The chapters explain these observations before the labs ask you to collect them. A running process, a ready Pod, and a successful booking tell you different things. Learning to connect them is part of becoming comfortable at the controls.
Keep the Troubleshooting Bible, Command Cheat Sheet, and Glossary nearby when you start investigating.
🚀 Ready for launch?
Begin with Mission Briefing: Before You Board. It leads through the course contract, prerequisite primer, airline story, and Launchpad briefing before the first container chapter.