Just passed the CKA - Kubernetes Certified Administrator certification exam in January with the new format and I’ll share my preparation with you. Follow this recipe and you will be ready to get your hands on CKA too!

Study material & strategy

  1. Get this course https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-administrator-with-practice-tests/ and go over all the videos at least once.

    There are a lot of details so maybe you want to keep notes. If you dont feel like taking notes, check my CKA Cheatsheet and study notes.

    Complete successfully all the practice tests along with the mock exams at least 3 times.

  2. While doing the practice tests try to use only the official documentation to simulate the real exam. In the examination, you’re only allowed to have one other browser tab open with the Kubernetes documentation. These pages only:

    https://kubernetes.io/docs
https://github.com/kubernetes
https://kubernetes.io/blog

    That means for example you can’t access discuss.kubernetes.io. Pay attention to that and try to complete the practice tests and exams only with the allowed resources.

  3. Bookmark documentation pages you find useful while solving the practice tests.

  4. Verify you have read at least once the kubectl-cheatsheet as it can be very useful for some questions.

  5. Pay extra attention to: etcd backup/restore, Persistent Volumes & Claims and how to configure them, kubeadm upgrade, RBAC , Network Policies, Ingress, DNS for services and pods, Advanced and Manual scheduling, How to debug a broken cluster

  6. Verify you can answer all the questions from this repo

  7. When you feel ready, you can try this practice test killer sh. It costs an extra amount but I found the material super useful as the last step to validate my level of readiness. This exam is more difficult than the actual one so you may fail the first time. Study the questions, check the answer & tips and retry.

  • Before the exam read: Handbook, Important Tips, FAQ

  • To save some time during the exam you can set in your terminal:

    alias k=kubectl
export do="--dry-run=client -o yaml"

After completing these steps I guarantee that you’ll feel quite confident!

May the kubectl be with you!