Certified Kubernetes Administrator Recap
TLDR; find your drive, get hands-on and practice, avoid distractions, and set a timeline.
I recently got CKA certified and it was a very satisfying experience. The best part of the exam was, it tested for actual hands-on knowledge of the system versus other exams where I had to balance between understanding grammatically cryptic answer options and true knowledge of the topic.
The motivation
As an architect riding the elevator daily and trying to closely connect strategy to the realities of engineering, I probably could just get by knowing this technology at an architectural level, however, I had always had the itch to grok deeper —
- Kubernetes strategies and related discussions get bloated very fast — any organization trying to adopt this technology still has to overcome the fud of justifying its use to broader use cases and technology scaling problems it can solve — knowing the system well allows me to understand what the engine room can realistically build — and should we really in the first place.
- I have been always into Linux and have admired how beautifully the system comes together to be the kernel of what the internet is today — so for all the kids who grew up tinkering Linux and have today built a career with it — Kubernetes is the next toy to learn and master, it is very rapidly becoming the open operating system of cloud.
- For an architect having a CKA allows him to think beyond enterprise and software architecture, and build sustainable systems fit for purpose, iterations and feedback loops become easier.
- Lastly, it is really fun — being able to connect and build with the nuts and bolts of the k8s system gives me great joy.
Reflections and Learnings
Getting hands-on — this is a non-optional must-have, if you do not love the command line, push harder to see its beauty and admire it — get very fluent with working on the command line.
Take the time to set up an environment that is fun to work with.
Start by avoiding working on web consoles that provide simulated scenarios — build your cluster, understand its internals. Mock exams are a great resource once you have overcome the hump of knowing k8s architecture, how clusters are built, managed, troubleshoot, and upgraded.
Avoid managed k8s services like EKS or GKE — and build clusters using kubeadm. It keeps the system simple, minimalistic, and easily traceable as you learn to break it. I used 2 months of free compute from digitalocean and vultr to run adequately large clusters for learning and practice.
Make the CLI environment fun to work with — on MacOS, I used tools like starship, tmux, a quite a few vim customizations.
Write your YAML manifests as you start out — it is very tempting to just copy-and-paste from the kubernetes documentation site to speed up the process — but writing down manifests will give a better grasp of concepts. It also helps build cli speed and endurance needed for the exam. Also, customize and gain speed with Vim — it will be the default editor in the exam.
Another skill to refresh on would be jsonpath and YAML — it helps a lot during the exam to be able to write queries and manifests fluently with speed.
Minimalism — The CKA exam goes deeper vs. wider in concepts and tools you would need to master — just like any other vendor technology — cncf landscape and k8s have too many things to learn and it can get overwhelming soon, the CKA exam will not need everything — the test is based on core k8s concepts only but in depth.
Try to keep things minimalistic as possible for the exam itself — you do not need a CD/CI process to build a cluster and manage its lifecycle, you do not need helm based package management or kyverno based policies (for CKA), but you do need to know all of the core concepts and functionality of k8s objects and components.
One of the pitfalls (and I suffered from it) is having a “shiny object syndrome”, it is easy to get distracted and in the pursuit of making the most robust system start to learn tools that ease one particular aspect of k8s management but is of no use for the exams — it may also abstract you from learning a core concept which is needed for the exam. I had to remind myself many times — “this thing is really new and cool — but is it needed for the exam?” — if not just play with it a bit, do not go into a rabbit hole and move on to something that will be needed for the exam.
Practice, practice, practice — The CKA exams comprise of multiple tasks you will need to complete within two hours — and the tasks aren’t really hard — but the skillsets required are above average in my opinion. Also completing these tasks needs a good level of mental endurance and tenacity. Practice scenarios whenever possible even from real production scenarios you encounter from your day job — for example, starting out I went through the entire exercise of setting up vault using a statefulset to learn concepts without abstractions and tools.
Once you have gotten past learning all of the core concepts, switch to web-based simulated practice scenarios and timed exams — this will build confidence and allow you to mentally prepare for the exams. Game-based scenarios are also a good measure of knowledge.
I found a lot of joy while understanding concepts when they were in action during multiple setups and exercises — this is why I started out on this journey in the first place. For example — k8s services and ingress, and how managed service providers use it alongside their network services is a very interesting topic.
Set a timeline and stick to it — it’s important to commit to a “by when” for certification, this will help with the right momentum and avoid distractions. For me, it was important as I rarely get to be hands-on firsthand in my day job. Set a reasonable (and not overly aggressive) timeline if you truly want to learn the technology and not just cram for the exam — for me it took about two and half months of studying, with about 4–5 hours of weekly commitment.
Setting a timeline also helps to focus on the topics that matter for the exam — and not get overly distracted in learning something else related (it’s very easy to do that in the k8s space)
Lastly, never doubt your readiness to sit for the exam — if you have put in the hard work you will get through it — that 2 hours go very fast.
The exam itself
For me, I got more anxious waiting about 18 hours for the result than the exam itself — but it was worth it.
- Attempt all the tasks and every question, and do not dwell on solving just one challenge task
- When solving problems, stick to the minimalistic, quick, and dirty approach — do not make it elegant, there is only so much time
- Avoid pitfalls and focus on commands as they get executed — sometimes it takes a while to revert back to the desired state — for example, “apt upgrade” and “apt update” are totally different things.
- Get in your zone before and during the exam — for me, it was an early morning meditation and then calming myself down before the exercises.
- And always have water in a clear bottle :) — ( I was asked to change my water bottle before the exam)
Thanks for making it this far, CKA is starting to be a very popular exam among k8s fanatics, and there are plentiful resources online — although some of the above points are stating the obvious, it was my attempt to share what I learned during the process of getting certified.
Good luck for yours,
