Renewed my “Kubernetes Certified Administrator” CKA 2020
I was one of the first people that did the initial beta CKA exam three years ago in 2017. Recently in November 2019, I have passed my CKAD “Certified Kubernetes Application Developer”. Just last week September 21, I had the opportunity to renew my CKA certification to be ready for the upcoming mysterious CKS “Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist”.
I have to say that LinuxFoundation is doing a great job in improving the exam platform and its features. making it more reliable, stable and usable by us the exam attendees. First time I took the exam at the initial beta launch, the environment was not that stable then, disconnects were the norm. later in CKAD the copy&paste feature was a bit awkward, however now in CKA 2020, I can assure you will much appreciate the new exam experience. One can focus on reading the questions. and questions are more realistic to the role of the CKA.
Exam is now seventeen (17) questions with scoring pass of sixty six (66% ) in two (2) hours.
Most of the CKA exam questions are concise brief and clear. Apart from two questions in my case, where I had a doubt which feature are they trying to exam me on? All were straightforward, no tricky questions. Should be very easy for an operator who has one year of experience working and troubleshooting Kubernetes. There is support for other languages other than English. I missed to use that, It could have cleared my doubts. time is more than enough if you know your material. I have enough time to review questions and answers.
How to prepare if you are new to Kubernetes?
if you do not have enough hands-on experience, you need to up your game and practice, practice, and practice.
Check my gitrepo https://github.com/walidshaari/Kubernetes-Certified-Administrator
My methodology is to only include primary resources from Kubernetes.io that are allowed in the exam, and optionally point out to community resources like Kubecon video and blog articles that shed more light in topics.
I can not stress enough on kubectl explain and kubectl explain — recursive
Also, the exam and certification should not be your end game, your objective should be to cover holistically the subjects to improve your Kubernetes operational and administrative skills, I find this can not be done separately from not helping developers onboard applications and troubleshoot with them issues.
Can’t recommend enough Kubecon videos and Duffie Cooly Grooking Kubernetes videos. both are referenced in the GitHub repository. They are gold in understanding concept and learning operational tricks.
Even though exam changes are RBAC, network policies, and ingress, I would say existing CKA courses should be sufficient as long as you work on 1.19 and 1.18+ cluster
What is next?
I am pursuing a journey to learn more about containers and Kubernetes security and documenting this in my new GitHub repo for the CKS https://github.com/walidshaari/Certified-Kubernetes-Security-Specialist. let me know if there is a subject you are interested in.
Have done a joint youtube talk with Saiyam Pathak, wrote about it in https://dev.to/walidshaari/the-ultimate-curated-resources-for-certified-kubernetes-security-specialist-cks-410l
