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Mastering the CKA Exam: Key Topics & Resources

By March 1, 2022June 24th, 2023Cloud

Certified Kubernetes Administrator. This was the toughest exam I’ve ever taken. It was so hard that this was the first exam I’ve ever taken and failed on the first try. Don’t let this put you off from taking the exam though, in the end you learn a lot and slowly everything starts to make sense. I spent about 2 months studying for this. Most medium blogs I read through recommended doing Kubernetes The Hard Way several times. While I do see the advantage of doing that, please don’t waste your time doing it. Once is definitely more than enough if you do want to try it. In this post I will give you some topics and resources to pass the exam.

Exam structure:

  • There are 17 questions
  • Around 8 were pretty easy to do (just read instructions off the docs)
  • The other half are where you will spend your time (troubleshooting, upgrading, recovery)

Topics you should focus on:

  • Volumes
  • RBAC authentication
  • Network policies
  • Services
  • Node upgrades
  • Monitoring/logging
  • Sidecar containers
  • ETCD backup and restore
  • Deployment scaling

Exam Prep Resources:

  • Kodekloud/Udemy’s course by Mumshad Mannambeth. Nothing can compare to this. Abuse the environment to the max for more practice!
  • killer.sh exams. These are harder than the actual exam. If you pass this one, you passed the exam no question.
  • These bookmarks. You are allowed to use the official docs so bookmarks are just a speed shortcut! I used these two and lost where I downloaded them from so if this is your bookmark, please let me know so I can credit appropriately.
  • cka_bookmarks
  • 2cka_bookmarks
  • These commands. I swear they save so much time editing yaml. You will be able to space correctly every time in the vi editor.
export do="--dry-run=client -oyaml"

vim ~/.vimrc
set tabstop=2
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=2

Good luck with the exam and let me know if you passed!

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