I have recently passed CKA exam after intense preparation schedule. I am very pleased to share my thoughts and tips of what does it take to get CKA certified.
Why CKA
IMHO, Kubernetes (k8s) is the most powerful container management platform that supersedes any tool of its kind existed before. Having worked on multiple container orchestration platform prior, i felt like i finally arrived at the right tool as it is a developer delight to work with; it has rich features and well architected that does not limit your abilities to extend further for your application needs. It is indeed the most valued tool/skill in IT industry.
However, mastering k8s does not happen by chance, without a sweat. You need to understand k8s primitives, how it works together and determine other k8s objects (such as configmap, secrets, volumes) needed for your first ever application deployment that ensures production readiness. This is the reason, most developers do not want to start using k8s or give up during the journey as they are not used to this much learning curve.
If mastering k8s requires serious effort, getting CKA certified requires much more dedication and perseverance. K8s core platform consists of a collection of distributed fault-tolerant components that work together seamlessly and ability to scale independently. The core components include API server, controller manager, scheduler, etcd (stateful key-value store), kubelet and container networking layer of choice. Therefore, one could not excel in CKA exam unless they have a decent understanding of the core components and tons of hands-on k8s experience because there is no multiple choice question. The exam is fully based on hands-on performance and you will be given 3 hours to solve 24 tasks distributed on one or more real k8s cluster, the complexity of the tasks ranging from simple application deployment to troubleshoot & fix a cluster components issue.
If you are one of the fortunate developer that do not have to create a cluster from scratch either allowed to use managed k8s platform such as GKE, EKS or access to custom solution that your enterprise team offers to bootstrap the cluster, one message to you, it would not help you becoming CKA certified. You must know how to configure k8s cluster from scratch, there is no shortcut.
Tips/Resources
- CKA exam prep repo by walidshaari: This repo has online learning resources that are organized by exam topics. This is one of the golden resources for CKA certification, this repo gets periodically updated. It really helped me to validate my preparation for the exam.
- Kubernetes The Hard Way (KTWH): The most loved repo created by Kesley hightower that illustrates step by step instructions to get k8s cluster created from scratch. It is detailed enough that anyone can create a cluster if they simply follow the instructions i.e. simple copy and paste works. However, you need to get mastered to create a cluster by yourself for the exam.
- #HeptioProTip blog posts: They have some good content that it will help you to save time in the exam. Please remember that 3 hours won’t be enough to complete 24 tasks unless you know some of these tips. You are literally racing against the time, i did not even take a single break for 3 hours.
- Kubernetes up and running book: Needless to mention, this is a well-written book that lays a strong foundation.
- Take time to read excellent blog posts by other CKA’s. They share good tips. It really helped in my CKA preparation and i take this moment to thank them.
Atlas, I strongly recommend you considering CKA certified because it is one of the unique certification exam that pushed me to try out many k8s features and acquire skills to create a cluster from scratch which i might not have got an opportunity to do at my everyday work.
Thanks for reading my post and share your feedback in comments!