Advanced Networking, Security, and Traffic Management in AKS

This course features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. In this course, you will gain hands-on experience configuring and securing an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environment, focusing on advanced networking, security, and traffic management. By diving deep into topics like HTTP proxies, egress traffic filtering, and preserving client IP addresses, you'll develop the skills to manage secure and efficient networking solutions in AKS. The course is designed to help you leverage powerful tools such as Calico, Cilium, and Cilium’s Hubble for granular traffic management, as well as integrating security measures like TLS/HTTPS for inter-pod communication and ingress controllers. The course begins with foundational lessons on managing outbound traffic using HTTP proxies and progresses into more complex scenarios like filtering egress traffic and assigning static IPs. You’ll also explore how to secure communications within the AKS environment, from preserving client IP addresses to managing secrets through Azure Key Vault and Kubernetes CSI Volumes. Each module is complemented by detailed demonstrations and real-world scenarios to help reinforce key concepts and provide practical, actionable knowledge. This course is ideal for IT professionals, network engineers, and cloud architects looking to deepen their understanding of Kubernetes security and networking in a cloud-native environment. It is especially beneficial for individuals working with AKS in production environments, or those planning to manage secure and scalable applications using Kubernetes on Azure. By the end of the course, you will be able to confidently configure and secure AKS environments, manage traffic and network policies, ensure data persistence, and implement best practices for securing your Kubernetes workloads.