PASSING KUBERNETES AND CLOUD NATIVE ASSOCIATE (KCNA) CERTIFICATION EXAM

What is KCNA? KCNA exam format Expectations and Experiences Preparation resources For some time ago I successfully passed a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification exam from CNCF and The Linux Foundation, and in this blog post I would like to share a few resources I’ve used for preparation, as well as a few personal experiences from the certification exam and format, that I hope can be useful for others who are getting ready for the exam 😺

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A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF UPCOMING KUBECON+CLOUDNATIVECON NORTH AMERICA 2023

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 is under a week away and I thought I would use this opportunity to share some of the personal reflections for the upcoming event, as well as highlight some of the sessions that I personally am looking forward to watching. Myself and Michael have also chatted about the event at Kubernetes Unpacked podcast - do check out this episode as well: Prepping For KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2023.

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RESILIENCE TESTING OF AZURE SERVICES WITH AZURE CHAOS STUDIO

Introduction Azure Chaos Studio Targets and use cases Creating and executing experiments Additional resources This blog post is a contribution to Azure Back to School - an annual community event taking place in September. For the Community by the Community, during the whole month of September, contributors share their knowledge and experience about Azure.

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KUBERNETES PORT FORWARDING: CLEANING UP ORPHANED PORTS

Introduction Is there a way to free up the port in this case? Linux Windows Reserved ports Introduction When working with Kubernetes there may be cases where you may need to use port forwarding to get access to an application running inside the cluster.

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HOW TO GET ALL AZURE POLICY ASSIGNMENTS OF A SPECIFIC CATEGORY?

I’ve been in quite a pickle recently: I needed to find out how many and what Azure Policy definitions from Guest Configuration category are currently assigned to my subscription, so that I could understand if any of those policies are applicable to Azure Arc-enabled servers that are residing in the same subscription.

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RESOLVING APPLICATION INSIGHTS PERFORMANCE COUNTERS COLLECTION ISSUE FOR .NET APPLICATIONS

If you’re using Application Insights SDK in your .NET applications and you want to gather performance counters like disk, memory or CPU usage, you have two main approaches that you can follow: EventCounters: this is a future-proof, cross-platform alternative to classic performance counters that natively supports collection of system and custom counters both from .

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SCANNING AZURE VMS, AZURE ARC-ENABLED SERVERS AND ACR IMAGES FOR VULNERABILITIES WITH MICROSOFT DEFENDER AND QUALYS

What is Defender for Cloud’s integrated Qualys? Implement scanning of Azure VMs and Azure Arc-enabled servers What about Azure Container Registry (ACR) and AKS? Additional resources In the modern reality with tens of security vulnerabilities that are being disclosed daily you need to continuously implement a variety of security controls in order to ensure that your systems are strongly protected.

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TAKEAWAYS FROM ATTENDING KUBECON+CLOUDNATIVECON EUROPE 2023, WEARING MANY HATS

Trends and session highlights Takeaways and tips Attendee Speaker CNCF Ambassador KCD Organizer Summing it up Last month, 18th-21st of April, KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe was happening in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and it was HUGE! With a fully sold out event, with more than 10000 in-person participants, 5000+ online participants and 20 parallell tracks, it has been the largest conference I’ve attended in-person so far.

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CREATING CUSTOM AZURE POLICY FOR KUBERNETES TO DISALLOW NON-COMPLIANT IMAGE REGISTRIES

There are cases where you may need to explicitly ensure that specific container image registries are blacklisted from being used in your Kubernetes clusters. Let me provide you with a very recent and relevant example. From 3rd April 2023, k8s.gcr.io legacy image registry is officially frozen which means that no images, future Kubernetes versions and patch releases for earlier Kubernetes versions will be pushed to this registry.

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KEEPING AKS CLUSTERS CONTINUOUSLY SECURE WITH AZURE POLICY

AzPolicy πŸ’œ K8s: Introduction and highlights AzPolicy πŸ’œ K8s: Practical walkthrough Azure Policy add-on Azure Portal Azure CLI Terraform Microsoft Defender for Containers Enforce Azure Policy definitions Enforce Azure Policy definitions in Azure Portal Enforce Azure Policy definitions via Azure CLI Enforce Azure Policy definitions via Terraform (IaC) Create and enforce custom Azure Policy definitions Azure Policy Remediation Additional resources πŸ‡This blog post is also a contribution to Azure Spring Clean 2023 where during 5 weekdays of March, 13th-17th, community contributors share learning resources that highlight best practices, lessons learned, and help with some of the more difficult topics of Azure Management.

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