Learning Kubernetes by solving a real-world problem

We’ve all been there — bookmarking useful links, switching devices, and eventually losing track of URLs we meant to come back to.

While working on other projects, I realized I was still relying heavily on tutorials whenever things got more complex in Kubernetes.

@Mischa van den Burg

newsletter last week was the push I needed to step away from guides and actually test whether the theory holds up in a real environment.

I decided to deploy Linkding, a self-hosted bookmark manager, on K3s via Rancher Desktop. This helped me move past “Hello World” and understand how production-style applications really behave in Kubernetes:

Self-healing: Watching pods get recreated and replaced
Networking: Seeing how Services expose applications locally
Persistence: Using PVCs so data survives pod restarts
Stateful workloads: Understanding why data needs special handling in K8s

By treating this as a real problem to solve, concepts like deployments, volumes, and pod lifecycles finally clicked.

If you’re learning Kubernetes, I highly recommend picking one small, real-world tool and deploying it this week. It’s one of the fastest ways to make the theory stick.

📦 Project repo (manifests included):https://github.com/Griffindeetox/linkding-kubernetes

4 comments