Course Introduction - KodeKloud

Welcome to the Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) course at KodeKloud. I’m Michael Levan, and in this lesson we’ll explore how to leverage LKE for deploying and managing Kubernetes workloads. This hands-on course guides you through:

Exploring the official LKE documentation
Provisioning Kubernetes clusters on Linode
Deploying and scaling applications with kubectl

While Kubernetes fundamentals are covered in our dedicated course, here we’ll contrast using a managed service like LKE against running an on-premises cluster.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

Compare managed Kubernetes (LKE) with self-managed, on-premises clusters
Create and configure LKE clusters
Connect to your LKE clusters using kubectl
Deploy and manage applications on LKE

Before you begin, ensure you have:

A Linode account
kubectl installed (see Kubectl Installation Guide)
Basic familiarity with Kubernetes concepts

Managed vs Self-Managed Kubernetes

Feature	Managed LKE	Self-Managed (On-Premises)
Control Plane Management	Linode-managed with SLA	You manage API server, etcd, etc.
Upgrades & Patching	Automated rolling updates	Manual patching and version upgrades
Node Provisioning	One-click node pool creation	Custom scripts or tooling
Scalability	Scale clusters in minutes via the LKE UI/CLI	Requires capacity planning and scripting
Cost Structure	Pay per node instance	Infrastructure + operational overhead

Links and References

Watch Video