Hey everyone,

I’ve passed the CKA exam 10 days ago, and I thought it would be nice if I share my experience with it, and the resources I used for studying with all of you.

I’m specialized in the IT infrastructure core components, such as servers management, storage systems, and virtualization, and I thought that it’s also necessary to learn about the container technology, – which is a very promising technology – to secure myself with better job opportunities in the near future. Anyways, in this article I will explain how I’ve studied Kubernetes, exam preparation, and how was the exam experience, and what points were covered by the exam I took.

Studying Kubernetes

It took about five months for me to be ready for the exam, and I believe that it;’s a must to study a container runtime engine (like Docker) first before you tempt to study Kubernetes, and the exam lab is configured with Docker, which means that you must learn Docker first if you aren’t familiar with it. I’m listing here the resources I studied Kubernetes from:

1. Pluralsight Course:
   • “Docker and Kubernetes – The Big Picture” by Nigel Poulton.
   • “Getting Started With Kubernetes” by Nigel Poulton
   • “Kubernetes Installation and Configuration Fundamentals” by Anthony Nocentino
   • “Managing the Kubernetes API Server and Pods” by Anthony Nocentino
   • “Configuring and Managing Kubernetes Storage and Scheduling” by Anthony Nocentino
2. Kubernetes Online Documentation: here

There’s plenty more at Pluralsight, but I think the above courses are quite enough to have a solid understanding about the theory behind the technology. Though, you need to practice in a lab to get yourself familiar with Kubernetes, you can’t pass the exam without practicing, and practicing very hard. You need to have at least three Linux virtual machines to study on, but if you don’t have enough hardware resources to practice on, don’t worry, in the next section I will tell you about online Kubernetes labs for you to use to study.

Exam preparation

You have to prepare very well and study very hard before your exam attempt. practice, practice, practice, and also practice. The exam is comprised of 24 questions, and you will need to answer the majority correctly within the exam period, which is 3 hours, and by the way, 3-hours are a very short period of time if you don’t practice well,

I’ve prepared for the exam from the following course on Udemy, and it’s the best exam prep. course ever as it comes with online practice labs for you to use. I have my own home lab, but the importance of that training course is that it brings you a broken environment to fix, and that’s what many of the exam questions are focusing on, I find it difficult for us to break our home lab, and then fix it, this course covers different troubleshooting scenarios, so, I’d urge you to have a look into it. This training course comes with tons of training labs, you will need to take each test several times to get yourself familiar with the kind of issues you may face in the exam, and also to train yourself to answer quickly.

“Udemy: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests” by Mumshad Mannambeth

Exam experience, and questions overview

The exam period of time is 3 hours, and the exam lab contains Ubuntu Linux machines, I’ve studied using CentOS, and feel free to use the Linux flavor you like, but it would be better to familiarize yourself with Ubuntu commands, like “apt-get”.

According to my experience with the exam, you should practice on everything, but don’t waste your time with learning the hard-way of deploying Kubernetes, just focus on the main concepts, and this is my own opinion indeed.

Also, during the exam, you are allowed to use Kubernetes documentation website, so, get yourself familiar with it prior to the exam attempt

I’m listing hereunder the topics were covered in the exam version I took:

• deploying pods (multiple questions).
• deploying and troubleshooting services.
• deploying and troubleshooting deployments.
• pods with init-containers.
• deploying static pods.
• nslookup for services and pods.
• fixing kubelet config file issues related to running static pods.
• deploying a cluster (kubeadm init) with configuration files.
• roles and cluster roles (RBAC).

Once again, you must practice very hard as time runs very quickly, and train yourself on how to focus on the questions, and read it very carefully, some questions are tricky in context, and be try to be calm to avoid having typo mistakes.

Finally, the exam was really easy for me as I’ve practiced a lot, so, it would be also very easy for you if you practice pretty well.

I hope this’s been informative, and I’d like to thank you for reading.