I scored 93% on the CKA : Some tips

Three weeks ago at the time of writing, I sat for the certified kuberneted application developer exam and scored 92. My goal was to clear the CKA too, so I gave myself 21 days to attain that goal.

I received the confirmation email this afternoon and to my suprise, I scored higher than I did on the CKAD (by one point but still).

In this short port I will detail how I managed to pass and hopefully some of you will be able to take something away from this.

Exam Preparation

It took me about a week of studying to become familiar with the concepts related to the exam.

Again, I used kodekloud’s course for the material. It was very thorough, and the labs were incredibly well done.

I used the remaining two weeks to practice the labs on kodekloud in addition to killer.sh and killercoda. For good measure I also attempted to install a cluster from scratch to become intimitately familiar with the components involved and kubeadm.

I finished all the questions in about 70 minutes, which afforded me 45 minutes to go back and check my answers.

The Exam

I’ve found the CKA and CKAD to be very similar. There’s a lot of overlap between the two certifications so if you’ve taken the CKAD or are working with kubernetes in your day job, it should honestly be a walk in the park.

If I could summarize the CKA I would say: CKAD with some troubleshooting and etcd.

The actual exam was also a lot easier than killer.sh and the labs on kodekloud (at least for me)

Tips

My advice would be to attempt the CKAD first as this will force you to learn the imperative syntax for all the resources you will have to create.

Brush up on network policies, they seem to come up very often.

Some questions will require you to create resources that don’t exist in the cluster and are not mentioned in the task so read the questions carefully. For instance: if and when asked to create an ingress resource, ensure that at least one IngressClass object is deployed.

Use kubectl explain instead of going back and forth with the docs. You will save some precious time.

Before you attempt any question, make note of all of them, the topic they cover and their weight. I used the following format:

1: pod  4%      DONE
2: etcd 8%      DONE
3: pod  4%      DONE
...

--- UNSURE ---
10: ingress  9%      (check ingress class exists)

Once you’ve answered a question, mark it as done in the file. This will save time at the end for you to do a second pass through your answers.

Conclusion

Everything you need to ace the exam is in the docs and covered in the kodekloud labs. Practice again and again and again. It’s better to be overprepared than fail because of overconfidence.

I wish you the best.

Karim aka 0xfishr