Welcome to Cloud Native Fundamentals, a course on Udacity that will guide you through the essentials of cloud native development. In this course, you will learn how to evaluate the cloud native ecosystem and explore the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and its associated tooling. You will also gain insights into the architecture considerations for cloud native applications, including choosing between a monolith or microservice-based architecture and evaluating the trade-offs involved. Additionally, you will learn about good development practices and how to apply them to your applications. The course will also cover container orchestration with Kubernetes, teaching you how to package and distribute applications using Docker, bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster using k3s, and deploy applications using Kubernetes resources. You will also delve into open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, understanding their usage and abstracted components, and exploring application deployment with Cloud Foundry. Furthermore, you will learn about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and their benefits, applying CI fundamentals using GitHub Actions and CD fundamentals using ArgoCD. Finally, you will learn how to use Helm as a configuration template manager to parametrize declarative Kubernetes manifests and deploy applications using ArgoCD and a Helm chart. By the end of this course, you will have a solid understanding of cloud native development and be equipped with the necessary skills to build and deploy applications in a cloud native environment.