// the take
Lab code for Dan Wahlin's paid Docker and Kubernetes courses on Pluralsight and codewithdan.com. It's a set of ASP.NET Core MVC/Web API projects with Begin/End folders per lesson, walking through containerizing a monolith, splitting it into Customers.API and Lookup.API microservices, and deploying them with Docker Compose and Kubernetes manifests. It's for developers following along with the course, not a reusable library or reference architecture.
The Begin/End split per lab is a genuinely useful teaching pattern — you can diff Begin against End to see exactly what each exercise adds, like the .k8s YAML files and Dockerfiles that appear only in the End state. The monolith-to-microservices example is a real, runnable progression: a single MVC app with repository classes that gets decomposed into two separate ASP.NET Core API projects each with their own Dockerfile and DbContext. Having both docker-compose.yml and docker-compose.k8s.yml side by side shows the same services expressed for two different runtimes, which is a decent concrete comparison.
The README is two links and nothing else — no setup instructions, no .NET version, no explanation of which lab maps to which course module, so it's unusable without already owning the course. This is a snapshot tied to whatever Docker/Kubernetes/.NET APIs were current when each lesson was recorded, and k8s manifests in particular (apiVersion, Service specs) tend to rot fast without anyone maintaining them against current cluster versions. There's no CI, no tests, and no indication the Lookup.API's bundled SQLite file or any secrets in appsettings.Development.json were scrubbed before committing. The 513 forks against 475 stars is consistent with students forking to follow along rather than any organic reuse — treat it as disposable course material, not something to build on.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →