You can definitely acquire the skill of Kubernetes and obtain certification to prove your knowledge within 3 weeks or even a shorter time period.
In the field of software development, everyone crave for the way to equip with versatile skillset in the midst of fast pace environment with rapid technological advancement. Kubernetes quickly emerged recent years and has become a common standard for the platform of application services. Mastering Kubenetes is surely a way to sharpen your competitive edge and uplift your skillset in the area of DevOps and microservice development.
I recently acquired this critical skill and got certified as Kubernetes application developer. Certainly, sitting for an exam is the effective way to master a new skill because of the well structure exam scope and the target for learner to achieve. Therefore, in this article, I will share my experience — practical step-by-step preparation, the suggested study plan, useful resources as well as the exam tips.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes (aka k8s) is not an English word, it is strange to me the first time I saw it several years. It is a powerful automated platform which orchestrates applications as docker images such as deployment, scaling, operation, etc. Many enterprises and startups have provisioned this platform in production nowadays.
About Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
CKAD is cloud agnostic and it focuses on the technology of Kubernetes, meaning that the skill is applicable across cloud providers such as AWS EKS, Google GKE, etc. You can focus on the core knowledge without being distracted by vendor product specific features. You can understand those vendor features easily after you have got the core concepts.
Once you have got certified, you can apply the newly acquired skills and contribute to your your team immediately thanks to the benefit of hands-on training.
About CKAD Exam
It is a 100% hands-on exam, you will complete the tasks to setup and troubleshoot issues on Kubernetes for each question. The exam consists of total 19 questions in 2 hours timeframe. A wide range of topics is covered, they are listed below by score weighting, including design, setup, deployment, monitoring as well as troubleshooting.
- Pod Design (20%) — Use of labels, pods selectors, etc
- Configuration (18%) — ConfigMap, Secret
- Observability (18%) — Liveness probe, readiness probe, logging, monitoring
- **Core Concepts (13%) **— Pod, deployment, scaling, service account, quota, job, cron job
- **Services & Networking (13%) **— Network policies and service components
- Multi-Container Pods (10%)— Side Car, Ambassador, Adapter
- State Persistence (8%) — Persistent volume setup
Pre-requisites
Before we go further, it is assumed that you have already got the basic knowledge of the following items.
- Docker — General concepts and basic operations
- **Shell script **— Basic commands and logical flow such as if-else, while loop, for loop.
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