In August 2020, I had the opportunity to pass both Kubernetes exams Certified Kubernetes Administrator & Certified Kubernetes Application Developer.

It was a hard decision because I learned about the change in the CKA curriculum starting from September (found here) and I am a few weeks away from the KubeCon Europe 20’. So I prepared for both curriculum but in the end, I preferred to attend the KubeCon holding my CKA or CKAD at least.

In my very first post in this blog and proudly after I successfully received both of them at the first attempt, I loved to share my experience and notes, what tips and hacks you must have to crack the Kubernetes exam.

Training

The two exams are 100% hands-on, I practiced a lot on kubectl and did kubernetes.io tasks for a period again and again. this must be your number #1 goal. The exam is almost copy-paste from the Kubernetes website, doing the tasks will help in exploring the docs and be familiar with the website also practice more on Kubernetes.

Have your Kubernetes Cluster

I started with building my Kubernetes 1.8 cluster using kubeadm so it becomes my field to further practice, other tools that set up a Kubernetes cluster like microk8s, kind or minikube are also fine but remember in CKA, you must have practiced bootstrap a cluster using kubeadm however CKAD it’s will not have to. In my experience during CKA, I was given a clusterConfiguration kind yaml file and asked to bootstrap a cluster using the yaml file. other questions were to fix a notReady node, join a node to the cluster. So you have to be fast on kubeadm for such tasks.

These page in the Kubernetes website helped me a lot :

• Creating a cluster with kubeadm
• Customizing control plane configuration with kubeadm
• The reference page for kubeadm document the tool command and its arguments

Practice on the cluster

After I set-ed up my cluster, I start to create deployments, expose services, provision volumes, attach config maps, and secrets to pod specs. All kinds of these tasks, you will be asked to do in the exam and more. what I highly recommend to do is to go through the Tasks section in the kubernetes.io website.

Among all the sections, I pick up the most important parts that cover bother CKA and CKAD:

• Install Tools
• Administer a Cluster
• Configure Pods and Containers
• Manage Kubernetes Objects
• Inject Data Into Applications
• Run Applications
• Run Jobs
• Access Applications in a Cluster
• Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging
• TLS
• Manage Cluster Daemons
• Networking

#devops #cncf #linux #kubernetes #docker