CKA

I’ve passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam.

I decided to renew an expired CKA.

The exam is still fully hands-on, and I still like this format.

My exam environment was based on Kubernetes v1.34.

Domains

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The CKA blueprint is split into five domains. Here is the weight distribution:

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pie showData
  title CKA domains (weights)
  "Troubleshooting" : 30
  "Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration" : 25
  "Services & Networking" : 20
  "Workloads & Scheduling" : 15
  "Storage" : 10

A quick breakdown of what sits inside each bucket:

• Troubleshooting (30%)

  • Troubleshoot clusters and nodes
  • Troubleshoot cluster components
  • Monitor cluster and application resource usage
  • Manage and evaluate container output streams
  • Troubleshoot services and networking

• Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration (25%)

  • Manage role based access control (RBAC)
  • Prepare underlying infrastructure for installing a Kubernetes cluster
  • Create and manage Kubernetes clusters using kubeadm
  • Manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters
  • Implement and configure a highly-available control plane
  • Use Helm and Kustomize to install cluster components
  • Understand extension interfaces (CNI, CSI, CRI, etc.)
  • Understand CRDs, install and configure operators

• Services & Networking (20%)

  • Understand connectivity between Pods
  • Define and enforce Network Policies
  • Use ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
  • Use the Gateway API to manage Ingress traffic
  • Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources
  • Understand and use CoreDNS

• Workloads & Scheduling (15%)

  • Understand application deployments and how to perform rolling updates and rollbacks
  • Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications
  • Configure workload autoscaling
  • Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing deployments
  • Configure Pod admission and scheduling (limits, node affinity, etc.)

• Storage (10%)

  • Implement storage classes and dynamic volume provisioning
  • Configure volume types, access modes and reclaim policies
  • Manage persistent volumes (PV) and persistent volume claims (PVC)

Preparation

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My prep was intentionally boring:

• Sander Van Vught
• KillerShell
• KillerCoda
• CTRL + SHIFT + V - make sure you use it fast enough

That’s more than enough if you already work with Kubernetes and can solve tasks under time pressure.

What felt different compared to ~5 years ago

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For me, the biggest deltas were:

• Gateway API: worth understanding as the modern direction next to classic Ingress
• CNI and networking: still the place where most people lose time
• Helm: you do not need to write charts, but you should be able to read and install things fast