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Free course
Intermediate
5 lessons
112 min

Kubernetes Scheduling

Learn Kubernetes CronJobs, schedule syntax, concurrencyPolicy, restart behavior, missed jobs, timezones, and production-safe manifests.


What you will learn

  • Write valid Kubernetes CronJob manifests.
  • Choose concurrencyPolicy and history settings intentionally.
  • Understand missed jobs, restarts, and timezone behavior.
  • Design CronJobs that are observable, idempotent, and safe to retry.

Course lessons

1. CronJob anatomy
20 min

Understand the relationship between CronJobs, Jobs, and Pods.

CronJob controller
Job template
Pod restartPolicy
Schedule field

Exercise: Create a daily cleanup CronJob manifest with restartPolicy: OnFailure.

2. Schedules and timezones
18 min

Translate standard cron syntax into Kubernetes CronJob schedules.

Five-field cron
.spec.timeZone
Controller timezone
DST caveats

Exercise: Preview the next five runs for a weekday 09:00 CronJob.

3. Concurrency and missed jobs
24 min

Control overlap and late execution behavior.

Allow
Forbid
Replace
startingDeadlineSeconds
Missed schedules

Exercise: Pick a concurrencyPolicy for a database backup job and justify it.

4. Secrets, resources, and cleanup
22 min

Build CronJobs that behave well in real clusters.

Secrets
Resource requests
History limits
Image pull behavior

Exercise: Add resource requests and job history limits to a CronJob YAML file.

5. Backup and maintenance patterns
28 min

Apply CronJobs to common DevOps automation tasks.

Backups
Reports
Retention cleanup
Health checks

Exercise: Design a Kubernetes backup CronJob with logging, retries, and verification.

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