Highlights from the Google Cloud Cloud Jam – GKE Intermediate workshop.

Pods

• A pod is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes (not the container itself, although GCP sometimes uses the terms interchangeably).
• Pods do not self-heal. Use higher-level controllers for resilience:
  • Deployment
  • StatefulSet
  • DaemonSet
  • Job/CronJob

I often work only with controllers, so I hadn’t considered that a naked pod lacks self-healing.

YAML vs. CLI

Two ways to create resources:

• CLI:

  kubectl run nginx -n namespace --image=nginx:latest
  

• YAML:

  kubectl apply -f nginx_deployment.yaml -n namespace
  

YAML is preferred—CLI commands become unwieldy with many flags and are hard to reuse. You can still inspect generated YAML later via kubectl get.

Namespaces

Best practice: specify namespaces via CLI, not inside the manifest.

kubectl apply -f mypod.yaml -n demo

If you hardcode the namespace in YAML:

metadata:
  name: mypod
  namespace: demo

…and then try to override with -n, it fails:

error: the namespace from the provided object "test" does not match "test-other"

Conclusion: keep manifests namespace-agnostic and inject the namespace when applying for greater flexibility.