Detailed Review Of Preparation

I recently passed the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam. I started my journey approximately a month and a half back in April. I started by watching Mumshad's course on CKAD on Udemy. It gave me quite a starting point. I liked his explanations of different complex topics.

I used to dedicate 2 hours each day for the course. I finished the course in around 15th May and booked the exam for 29th May.  For the 2 weeks, I used to practice using practice tests present in Mumshad's course. Soon, I finished them and I had nothing to more to practice or so I thought. Then I used Linux Academy's practice exams and labs given in their courses and they were quite helpful.  Both of these courses were aligned with the exam and helped me a lot in passing them. I noted which sections I was weak in and went back to their specific Labs.

Format of Exam:

Click here to book the exam

This exam consists of 19 questions that are needed to be solved on the Kubernetes cluster practically. This exam is 100% practical based. You can still open an additional tab for Kubernetes documentation.

Total TIme: 2 hours 

Price: 300$

Total Questions: 19 

Tips for Exam:

1. Use alias and autocomplete for alias

alias k=kubectl
complete -F __start_kubectl k

 No need to remember it. The exam allows you to open an extra tab to visit kubernetes.io. Just type alias in the search bar in Kubernetes .io and visit the first link. It's all given in there. Sometimes the names of pod and namespaces are too long and using full command name will just make it look unreadable something like :

Kubectl get deployment deployments.app mysql-buster-12414325235135 -n alpha-beta-gamma -o yaml > deploy.yaml

using alias kgd='kubectl get deployment -o yaml ' You can shorten this in the following manner

kgd deployments.app mysql-buster-12414325235135 -n alpha-beta-gamma > deploy.yaml

You can also make custom aliases for your ease. I made aliases for common commands that I knew I will be using a lot definitely.

These were,

  alias kg='kubectl get pod'

  alias kga='kubectl get pod --all-namespaces'

  alias kc='kubectl create -f'

  alias kd='kubectl delete -f'

2. Use documentation effectively. This is where solving problems from the mock tests will help you. The answer to your questions are given in the documentation, you just need to know where.

3. Use the --dry-run command. This command is used to check whether your command is correct and if it is you can use -o yaml flag to get the yaml code for the component and store it in a YAML file.

4. The exam uses the latest version so better if you read the latest documentation as the courses I have mentioned use bit old versions of Kubernetes.

5. In the exam, there will be multiple clusters like k8s,n8s,d8s. There will be commands to change clusters. First, read the question and see which cluster it is working on and if it is different then copy and paste the command from the question to set the cluster. A precautionary method will be to copy-paste the command for every question if you don't know which cluster you are on.

I hope that was helpful to you. Here are some links that you might be interested in:

Links for Courses:

1. Mumshad Mannambeth: CKAD course

2. Linux Academy: linuxacademy.com CKAD Course

3. CKAD Exam booking 

4. Kubernetes official Documentation