Early in 2022 I took (and passed) both the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exams.
There are a number of posts out there that describe preparing for the exams that go into a ton of detail. This will not be one of those posts. 😉
The CKA / CKAD exams are scenario based exams. You’re given around 17 scenario based questions and you have two hours to complete the exam. I’m typically a slow test taker…but I found two hours to be more than enough time to not only complete the questions but to go back and review my answers.
On a side note…why would you ever want to take a non-scenario based exam? I don’t get it. Nothing but multiple choice questions. Questions where the wording tries to “trick” you? No thanks. Give me a scenario and a lab simulation any day. When looking at which certifications I want to maintain, I’m definitely going to favor the scenario based ones.
Long story short, I highly recommend the following courses:
- https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-administrator-with-practice-tests/
- https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-application-developer/
Both courses cover what you need to know for the exam. Better yet, each section has labs offered through KodeKloud.com (which is essentially the instructor’s own WBT platform) that come included with the Udemy courses.
Note: If you’re not familiar with Udemy, I’d recommend waiting for one of their frequent sales. A $200 course is often discounted down to $15-20.
Once I had made my way through all the content (taking detailed notes along the way), I basically lived in the KodeKloud labs. I practiced constantly. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there.
I got pretty proficient at:
- Performing tasks quickly
- Quickly being able to find what I need (YAML, useful jsonpath expressions, etc.) on https://kubernetes.io/
When taking the exams, you have access to the K8 documentation. In fact, you can even create bookmarks in your browser to the pages you’ll need the most. For the exam, I set my browser up with a Kubernetes bookmark folder and got rid of all other site bookmarks. The proctor had no issues with this.
And…well…that was basically it. I had run through all the labs and practice exams and “games” offered through KodeKloud so many times that I felt like I could do most things in my sleep.
One mistake I did make was not making better use of the killer.sh practice exams (which I had no clue existed). If you sign up for exams through Linux Foundation (https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification/certified-kubernetes-administrator-cka/), you have access to practice exams offered through killer.sh. I believe these practice exams are available for something like 36 hours. I’d recommend giving yourself plenty of time to utilize these practice exams and review the answers to the questions. Now these killer.sh exams are hard! It kind of freaked me out before the exam. But I found the exam questions to be much easier.
Note: Linux Foundation offers Black Friday sales (around $100 off some exams). It might be worth it to you to purchase the exam during this or other sales.
I hope the above helps! I know that with some certs, you have to build out a catalog of resources to help prepare for the exam. In my experience, the CKA / CKAD courses and labs offered by KodeKloud (Mumshad) gave me everything I needed. I can’t recommend them enough.
Good luck!
