Portworx Certified Administrator

Portworx is the cloud-native storage company that enterprises depend on to reduce the cost and complexity of rapidly deploying containerized applications across multiple clouds and on-prem environments. With Portworx, you can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler. You get a single data management layer for all of your stateful services, no matter where they run. Portworx thrives in multi-cloud environments.

This course goes into advanced concepts about Portworx with lectures and hands-on labs that can be accessed right in the browser.

In this course, we start where we left off in the fundamentals course. We take a closer look at Portworx on Kubernetes – where we look at the various Design considerations while preparing for a Portworx deployment on Kubernetes, we look at Portworx Central and the various options available to deploy Portworx on Kubernetes. We then look at deploying Portworx on an EKS cluster. We look at deploying a stateful application like Cassandra with Portworx volumes.

We then explore Day 2 activities like adding additional Portworx nodes, expanding storage pool, resizing PVCs, and managing Capacity using AutoPilot.

We then take a deeper look at the Portworx Architecture where we see how Portworx devices are made available to hosts and how a write makes its way from the application to the disk.

We look at how Portworx ensures data integrity and how it handles failures of nodes, disks or networks. We look at ETCD and how to recover from ETCD in case of a failure. We explore how Portworx smartly places volumes based on the topology and how we can customize the behavior with volume placement strategies, before finally looking at storage pool cache and different classes of service.

We then move on to Portworx security where we explore the various security concepts such as Authentication, Authorization, how to use contexts to work on different Portworx clusters with different sets of credentials. We look at how Portworx helps secure data at rest with Encryption and how we configure cloud credentials.

And of course, all of these are accompanied by real hands-on labs.

We then look at the different options available for configuring Backups in Portworx such as taking Snapshots, backing up to cloud or any s3 compatible object store using CloudSnaps, scheduling backups at regular intervals, taking application-consistent backups using 3D snaps and finally we look at how to backup an entire application in Kubernetes including the configuration objects as well as volumes. And this is also where we get introduced to STORK – an open-source storage orchestration project for Kubernetes developed by Portworx and we will see its role in all of these operations.

We then look at migration and disaster recovery. We get introduced to cloud migrations with Kubemotion, we look at Synchronous and Asynchronous DR. Again, each of these lectures is accompanied by Demos or Labs.

We then look at Logging and Monitoring concepts. We explore using the FluentD, ES and Kibana stack for logging and the Prometheus and Grafana stack for monitoring, before finally looking at managing alerts in Portworx.

In the final section, we explore some additional topics such as Troubleshooting a Portworx cluster, performing maintenance activities, Performance Tuning, and Licensing.