A Resource Guide for the CKA Exam

As one of the highest velocity open source projects in history, Kubernetes has taken the tech economy by storm. This economic shift has been flaring up in fields like DevOps, SysAdmin, software development, information security, and other cloud native spaces.

When it comes to plotting your Kubernetes Administrator certification (CKA), you have a lot to consider. From hands-on training to more important considerations like practice lab setups, building Kubernetes clusters, implementing observability, and so much more.

CNCF and The Linux Foundation have open-sourced the exam curriculum around which the CKA program has been created. This is for the benefit of organizations to develop open-source talent and provide assurance that Kubernetes administrators have the sound technical expertise and functional knowledge to maintain the production-grade Kubernetes cluster.

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator — CKA program allows professionals to demonstrate their skills for designing and implementing solutions to leverage a Kubernetes cluster and perform all the critical responsibilities of Kubernetes administrators.

This living guide is direct to the point and profitable to help you become highly equipped for the CKA exam with all the required resources. To learn more about the Kubernetes career roadmap, we recommend reading our pillar article on the Kubernetes Certification path.

CKA Exam Guide

The CKA exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple tasks in a hands-on, command-line environment aligned with the most recent K8s minor version.

• Kubernetes v1.25 Combiner
• Candidates have 2 hours to complete the tasks
• Cost $395 (One Retake)

Certified Kubernetes Administrator — Official Registration

CKA Badge - 

There are no prerequisites for CKA training. However, having a below skill-set is recommended:

• Basic Linux administration skills, including shell Scripting
• YAML/JSON knowledge
• Basic Docker knowledge (not low-level)
• Basic knowledge of DevOps methodologies

Exam Resources

These hands-on resources are guaranteed to be up-to-date to help you pass the performance-based CKA exam.

Training Courses

• Kubernetes fundamentals — The Linux Foundation
• Kubernetes administration — live training suitable for teams by The Linux Foundation
• CKA hands-on training – KodeKloud 
• CKA course by DevOps experts – Whizlabs

Books

• Acing the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam 
• CKA Study Guide: In-Depth Guidance and Practice

Practice Labs

• Killercoda — Playground and interactive scenarios for Kubernetes administration studies.
• Minikube — Tutorial on how to run a sample app using minikube & Katacoda
• Play with Kubernetes — Simple and interactive playground to learn Kubernetes
• Play with Kubernetes Classroom — K8s hands-on workshop by Docker
• Killer.sh – Exam environment

Cloud Credits

• DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes — $200 Credit
• Linode Kubernetes cluster deployments — $100 Credit
• Google Kubernetes Engine — $300 Credit
• Azure Kubernetes Service — $200 Credit

More practice resources, including Community forums, events, blogs, and podcasts (links) are added in thisKubernetes resources article.

CKA EXAM domains — open source curriculum

The open source exam curriculum includes the following domains:

Let’s look at each domain below.

Storage

Kubernetes storage architecture is beneficial for dynamically scaling and administering K8s apps with feature-rich support for multiple storage backends. It is technically great for dynamic provisioning. The domain examines your understanding of implementing a convenient way for applications to request and use storage resources.

Domain 1

Learn how to provide both long-term and temporary storage to pods in your cluster. Although it weighs only 10% in the exam, storage management in Kubernetes can be complex with challenges pertaining to data integrity, preservation, replication, and migration. With practice, you can become thoroughly acquainted with the basics of persistent volumes and persistent volume claims.

For most CKA job roles, you need to have an in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes storage classes. Learn how StorageClasses can provide a great deal of flexibility and control over how data is stored. This approach makes it possible to tailor the storage infrastructure to the needs of the workload.

Troubleshooting

Being a Certified Kubernetes Administrator means you have the knowledge and skills to tend to Kubernetes responsibilities, such as application monitoring for troubleshooting failures, maintaining clusters, and node logging to operate workloads productively.

Domain 2

Learn effective management of faults and best practices for taking proactive measures to prevent issues in Kubernetes components. Gain hands-on experience managing and operating workloads using free cloud credits to deploy sample applications and implement monitoring controls and compliance requirements.

The CKA training by KodeKloud is very popular in the Kubernetes and DevOps community for gaining hands-on troubleshooting experience in sandboxed environments. It will help you develop a good understanding of a well-administered K8s environment and learn the best troubleshooting practices.

Workloads & Scheduling

A workload is an application that runs millions of daily jobs managed inside a set of pods on Kubernetes. Learn the necessary skills for deploying, managing, and operating workloads on Kubernetes.

The domain tests your practical knowledge to schedule workload capacity for high scalability. Learn the best practices to understand the primitives used to create robust application deployments for both stateless and stateful applications in a Kubernetes cluster.

Domain 3

To understand Kubernetes workloads properly, learn how Kubernetes provides you with the platform to schedule and run containers on clusters of both physical or virtual machines.

You must be familiar with the kube-scheduler, the default scheduler for Kubernetes that runs as part of the control plane. You can also implement a custom scheduler using the Kubernetes documentation to learn more about scheduling, and with free cloud computing credits.

Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration

A functioning Kubernetes deployment is referred to as a cluster, which includes the control plane and compute machines, or nodes. Each node runs pods, which are made up of containers.

The CKA exam assesses your technical expertise in developing and maintaining an advanced platform to manage the Kubernetes cluster lifecycle.

Domain 4

It is important to understand the main components of the Kubernetes architecture, as this knowledge will help you provide guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications and projects within the enterprise. Developing the ability to map business objectives to application/architecture requirements is also critical.

Services and Networking

The Kubernetes platform utilizes a flat network structure, eliminating the need to map host ports to container ports. This differs from other networking platforms for running distributed systems, which require dynamic port allocation to share machines between applications.

The domain validates expertise in advanced networking architectures for cluster networking, including service discovery features and interconnectivity options between pods. It covers basics of networking configuration, as well as LoadBalancer, Ingress resources, CoreDNS, network interface plugins, and other topics.

Domain 5

Learn how containers within a pod communicate using networking.

Understand how different components in the Kubernetes platform (pods, containers, nodes, and applications) communicate with each other and with other applications. Develop a strong understanding of the Container Networking Interface (CNI), which connects pods across nodes by acting as an interface between a network namespace and a network plug-in or provider in a Kubernetes network.

FAQs — CKA program

What is the CKA program?

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) credential is one of the most in-demand and challenging certifications available today. This program provides assurance to companies that practitioners have the technical skills, knowledge, and competency to perform the responsibilities of Kubernetes administrators.

How hard is the CKA exam?

Some say that the CKA exam is harder than the CKAD and CKS, but this is relative to your experience. The scenarios for troubleshooting, cluster architecture, and networking can be complex, but not impossible to understand. With hands-on training and consistent practice, you can tackle the problems and earn the respectable CKA badge.

Is CKA best for DevOps?

The CKA certification exam is particularly beneficial for those pursuing a career in DevOps. As Kubernetes has become an essential tool for DevOps teams, possessing a CKA certification is highly desirable for job roles in DevOps, SRE, and Cloud engineering. In today's cloud-native era, it is even more crucial for aspiring cloud engineers and DevOps professionals to secure jobs based on their Kubernetes skills.

CLOSING NOTE

There is high demand for Kubernetes skills as more and more companies move to containerized environments. The most popular Kubernetes-related tech roles include DevOps engineer, Cloud administrator, Open source administrator, SRE, and Cloud engineer.

Learning Kubernetes administration for CKA is certainly worthwhile. It may be intimidating for novices, but with hands-on training and practice, you'll pass this tough exam with flying colors.