Finally Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam cleared.

I was preparing for it from almost a year and it still took me two attempts to clear it. It was difficult because the syllabus is widely spread its difficult to remember and some of the debugging tricks are not mentioned in the kubernetes documentation at all but i don’t blame them because honestly how much we can dig into documentation in two hour exam.

In the following sections I will try to pen down my pain points and techniques helped me passing CKA

Firstly, some pointers about the CKA exam.

1. It’s a two hour problem solving hands-on exam.
2. There are no objective questions.
3. Some questions have higher weightage than the others.
4. I got 17 questions in both of my attempts.
5. The new exam interface opens a Linux system remote-session instead of browser based terminal during my CKAD time in December 2021
6. Most of the problem have multiple tasks e.g: problem 1 have to 4 sub tasks if you complete of 2 of them you will still get 50% of the problem 1 even if you didn’t attempt other 2 sub tasks.
7. Also couple problems are debugging tasks with as much as 13% weight-age; which makes them super important to attempt and only one sub task “fix the problem”, so you will either score 100% or nothing.
8. Candidate must score 66% marks to clear CKA

Pain points:

1. Unlike CKAD I was not able to practice what I was learning on the real running clusters and that’s same for debugging scenarios. Because lot of time it requires to break something big or that thing only exists in vanilla kubernetes cluster.
2. All the clusters from my office projects are managed clusters like AWS-EKS, GKE and Azure’s AKS which means i don’t have access to control-pane node and i cannot practice what i am learning on an actual production grade node.
3. TLS Certificates – There are just too many .crt and .pem files paths to remember. Almost every service KubeAPI and ETCD etc.. have individual set of certificates which makes it very difficult to remember.

Preparations for the exam

1. It’s a very hands of exam and almost all the problems require some kind of debugging or creation of new resources or sometimes both; that’s why doing practice labs is important.
2. I took Mumshad Mannambeth’s CKA course from Udemy which comes with awesome practice labs.
3. Going through the labs is crucial to learn the way of solving problem during actual exam.
4. For more practice, I have also gone through KillerCoda CKA labs https://killercoda.com/killer-shell-cka

Cloud based exam

1. You don’t have to install anything specific on your machine for this exam. They will provide you browser based access where you can access you linux remote-session.
2. New Linux OS remote-session, during my CKAD exam they were using browser bases console session. But this time they have remote-session to a linux machine.
3. Just keep your chrome/firefox browser up to date.4. Avoid using office machine because it might not have required permission to share your screen.

Its an open book test

This means you are allowed to open browser inside the remote-session to explore documentation related to Kubernetes.https://kubernetes.io/docs/

Time is running out

1. Set a personal timer for every problem according to its weightage, e.g: for a 3% weight-age question you don’t want to spend more than 5 mins.
2. There will be some problems which you can solve if you spend little more time. Don’t fall for that, you only need 66% to pass the exam and time is running out. So try to attempt as many problems as possible. Certainly you can solve all the problems because it’s a open book test and you have the documentation opened but time is running out therefore restrain yourself from spending more than enough time on a problem and move on. You can always mark the problem and come back to it if you have spare time.

Taking notes is allowed – But only inside the remote session

In the new Linux remote session, you don’t have a dedicated notes area to write down your notes but there is a app already installed named “mousepad” similar to Window’s Notepad, use it to write about the problem you want to come back to along with difficulty level or some notes. This way you don’t have to spend time on reading the most complex problem in the end for which you might not have enough time to take on.

Super Tip!!

Don’t try to learn the solution to every problem instead try to learn the method of “how to solve a problem”. e.g: Go through Mumshad’s practice labs solution video’s there i have learnt the method of solving them problem.