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Drills

Quick muscle-memory exercises. Each drill takes 1-5 minutes. Do them to build speed and confidence with CLI tools.

How to use

  1. Read the question
  2. Try to answer from memory (type the command in a terminal)
  3. Check the answer key in answers/
  4. If you got it wrong, note the correct answer and retry tomorrow

Drill Sets

Core Drills

Set Focus Count Difficulty File
kubectl Kubernetes CLI debugging and operations 25 Mixed (Easy→Hard) kubectl_drills.md
helm Helm chart management and debugging 15 Mixed (Easy→Hard) helm_drills.md
observability Prometheus, Loki, Grafana querying 15 Mixed (Easy→Hard) obs_drills.md
ci CI pipeline and security scanning 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) ci_drills.md

Advanced Drills

Set Focus Count Difficulty File
PromQL Prometheus query language patterns 25 Mixed (Easy→Hard) promql_drills.md
LogQL Loki query language patterns 20 Mixed (Easy→Hard) logql_drills.md
Service Mesh Istio traffic mgmt, mTLS, debugging 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) service_mesh_drills.md
GitOps/ArgoCD Applications, sync, App-of-Apps 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) gitops_argocd_drills.md
Secrets Mgmt Sealed Secrets, SOPS, ESO, Vault 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) secrets_management_drills.md
etcd Ops Backup, restore, space recovery 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) etcd_drills.md
Container Debug crictl, nsenter, strace, /proc 12 Mixed (Easy→Hard) container_runtime_drills.md
Policy Engines Kyverno, OPA Gatekeeper, PSS 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) policy_engine_drills.md
FinOps VPA, quotas, spot, cost optimization 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) finops_drills.md
TLS/PKI cert-manager, openssl, ACME 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) tls_pki_drills.md
Database Ops StatefulSets, backup, PITR, failover 8 Mixed (Easy→Hard) database_ops_drills.md
K8s Operators CRDs, reconciliation, Kubebuilder 8 Mixed (Easy→Hard) k8s_operators_drills.md
Cloud Deep-Dive IRSA, Workload Identity, VPC, LBs 6 Mixed (Medium→Hard) cloud_deep_dive_drills.md
Postmortem/SLO SLIs, error budgets, postmortems 8 Mixed (Easy→Hard) postmortem_slo_drills.md
Alerting Rules PromQL alerts, Alertmanager, LogQL 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) alerting_rules_drills.md

Infrastructure & Tools Drills

Set Focus Count Difficulty File
Terraform init/plan/apply, state, modules, import, workspaces 12 Mixed (Easy→Hard) terraform_drills.md
Ansible Ad-hoc, playbooks, roles, vault, Jinja2 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) ansible_drills.md
Networking DNS, Services, NetworkPolicy, Ingress, CIDR 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) networking_drills.md
Git Rebase, cherry-pick, bisect, reflog, stash 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) git_drills.md
Security RBAC, scanning, securityContext, supply chain 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) security_drills.md
Datacenter POST, RAID, IPMI, PXE, SMART, capacity 8 Mixed (Easy→Hard) datacenter_drills.md
Modern CLI fd, rg, bat, jq, yq, fzf, tmux 12 Mixed (Easy→Hard) modern_cli_drills.md
Cloud Ops AWS/GCP CLI, IAM, VPC, DNS, cost 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) cloud_ops_drills.md
Python DevOps JSON, YAML, subprocess, K8s client 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) python_drills.md
Linux Ops Processes, systemd, disk, memory, performance 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) linux_ops_drills.md
Docker Build, debug, networking, volumes, compose 10 Mixed (Easy→Hard) docker_drills.md

Difficulty key: Easy = recall a single command; Intermediate = combine flags or two commands; Hard = multi-step pipeline or requires understanding of internal behavior.

  • Daily: 5 kubectl drills (rotate through the set)
  • Weekly: 5 helm drills + 5 observability drills + 5 from an advanced set
  • Before interviews: All drills, timed
  • Deep-dive week: Focus on one advanced topic per week (all drills in the set)