Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
~~~12 Months~~~
You Read It Right! You get 12 months to prepare for CKAD exam upon buying CKAD Exam Voucher!
Yet I took exam on the last day of the exam voucher expiry ;)
Flashback:
Meltwater the company that I work at, known for its culture and leader in Media Monitoring space, has an amazing work culture, allowing employees to learn and implement what they wish/like!
Huh! Why am I stretching this!!
Fast Forward:
One of the teams which extensively works in installing/configuring/managing (well everything in and out) with respect to Kubernetes at Meltwater, brought in options for interested engineers to take part in CNCF Events as we were among the End User Supporters of CNCF
Grabbing this as opportunity to learn more about Kubernetes, led towards interest in me picking up CKAD
Pause:
Oh Ya “Fast Forward” was just for namesake, as mentioned in the first line I wrote exam on the last day of voucher expiry so for almost 10 months there was a big Pause as I was procrastinating if not working ;)
Motivation:
Amazing team of engineers that I work with, was looking for an introduction to K8S, yes that is where all the motivation to actually go ahead learn and share knowledge led me towards CKAD.
Time:
It took about 3–4 weeks and about 3 hours a day of practice/reading.
Preparation:
Thanks to:
- My colleague Federico Hernandez (recollir) for giving a kickstart info on preparation for CKAD.
- Mumshad Mannambeth and team for amazing CKAD course and labs.
- Dimitris-Ilias Gkanatsios for good walk-through scenarios with answers
- Bhargav Bachina for 150 Questions for the CKAD Exam
- Ahmet Alp Balkan for K8s Network Policy Recipes
The List:
- CKAD course and labs.
- Practice Scenarios
- Practice Questions
- Network Policy Recipes
- Kubernetes.io of-course
- Bookmark K8S documentation, as it is allowed to open K8s document during exam, a good one to start with https://github.com/reetasingh/CKAD-Bookmarks
Tips:
Time = Value!
You will literally feel this during CKAD exam.
Ensure you check percent against each question. Many questions will be of just 3% value but question itself will take a few minutes of your time to understand
Practice Makes Perfect
The more you practice, the more you can score.
As exam is hands on, it is not about how much you understand theoretically but how many times have you done something similar. So more you practice more you would succeed in this exam
- MiniKube on laptop is good, however you may spend time setting up node or cluster and other objects which is out of scope of exam.
- Katacoda has a good set of playground for you to practice.
- Killer.sh (you get two free practise/dummy exams with CKAD exam vouchers)
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Always check which Context and Namespace you are on
Context / Namespace might be different per question, be alert to see which context/namespace you have to answer
Fastest Finger First
The faster you are at typing, finding info etc the more you can score.
- Imperative way of creating K8S objects will save your day (exam day)
- K8s cheatsheet is definitely a life saviour, however note this itself might eat your time if you have to work on different namespace/context against each question.
- ̶W̶e̶ Vi will survive — Yes vi commands on how quickly you can play with it can help you achieve some tasks quicker than usual.
Note:
CKAD exam curriculum is changing from 28th Sep 2021. Above resources might serve less purpose, nevertheless is not waste of time for sure.
Keep an eye here about curriculum and FAQ’s here
Handy Notes:
- Kind and its apiVersion
Note: Always rely on the environment you run. Below command helps in finding correct version.
kubectl explain <object name>
Some code samples tried for practising
