S12. Containers, virtualization and high availability

Outcome: you can run and secure containers and design for availability.

Skills: container images and runtimes, orchestration basics, virtualization platforms, clustering, load balancing, shared storage, failover, hardening containers.

Labs

1. Build a container image, publish to a private registry and run it with limits.
2. Run a three-container app with Compose or Podman pods.
3. Build a two-node web cluster with a shared IP and test failover.
4. Set up a load balancer in front of two web servers and pull one node offline.
5. Scan an image for vulnerabilities and fix the findings.

Prove it: a documented failover test with timings and a container hardening checklist.

Certs: LPIC-3 305 or 306 (choose a track now), Cloud+ (deployment, DevOps), Linux+ (containers).

Gate: LPIC-2 happens here. LPIC-2 needs an active LPIC-1.