RodrigTech

Certified Kubernetes Administrator Tips and Tricks

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rodrigtech
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Certified Kubernetes Administrator is the premier certification in my opinion if your in DevOps its likely you’ll come across this technology and cross the linux foundation in your OSS studies.

Given that this exam was a pain in the rear so to speak taking multiple times I felt like I could at least write a blog post detailing my study plan to help others out there ideally crack this exam on the first attempt.

CKA

Approach and Tactics

  • CKA was on my radar since 2020 when I was aware of the disruption of technology that microservices introduced but also the novelty of this technology and not much industry wide certifications that covered this scope.
  • I originally took advantage of a black-friday deal back in 2021 that was phenomenal CKA+CKS bundle that I believe was around mid 200’s USD. This tied me to a deadline being one year from the purchase which happen to land recently December 1st of this year 2022.
  • While certifications are typically challenging this one proved to be a great challenge and worth it for the hands-on learning aspect that CNCF has embraced with these practical hands-on labs that you’re required to pass.
  • Estimated prep time from mid October to end of November and first weeks of December roughly 1.5 months.

Okay now the bulk of the brief and summary of the background lets dive into the actual details of the exam. First time management is by far a understatement because two-hours goes by extremely fast especially when your methodically working through the exam without violating the NDA you need a strategy prior to starting the exam.

Domains and Competencies covered from CNCF

  • Storage (10%)
  • Troubleshooting (30%)
  • Workloads & Scheduling (15%)
  • Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration (25%)
  • Services & Networking (20%)

Notice the weight of (troubleshooting) this will also come in handy because this is what I primarily focused on and practiced on/off to gain a more comprehensive understanding of what can and will go wrong in production environments.

The best part of the exam attempt is the second-chance which essentially acts as your insurance the exam also comes with the exam simulator (killer.sh) this is a gold mine much more challenging then the actual exam but a good experience similar to the exam.

  • KodeKloud I chose to tackle this were pivotal because given that its a hands-on nature my worry the most was my day-to-day wasn’t dealing with operations of Kubernetes so this was pivotal. https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-administrator-with-practice-tests/
  • Pluralsight – CKA Prepratory Course which has a tranch of labs that are walk-through with a great instructor you can find the link to that https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/certificate/certified-kubernetes-administrator which actually covers some more advanced concepts that aren’t necessarily covered in the curriculum but a good understanding and practice to bring it all full circle.
  • Kubecampus.io this website is a learning lab platform provided by Veeam and Kasten which provides enterprise data protection backup to kubernetes clusters and is really easy to use this platform will definitely aide your understanding of various subjects from starter to advanced concepts and best part its FREE
  • killercoda.com If you’ve been around of the early data of katacoda.com this is essentially the rebranding of that but entirely new platform with labs built on CKA/CKS and you name it simply link your credentials and you can access this as many times as you’d like for free.

Experience

I’m still vehemently not a fan of PSI Services for a couple of reasons the testing experience varies if you’ve done enough certifications with other vendors in my opinion this is the one you’d rather avoid but since CNCF contracts this organization you’ll have no choice. You’ll have a sandbox browser environment that will provide you with a kubernetes cluster running kubeadm – in the past you were able to utilize two monitors this isn’t the case now and moving forward you can reference the documentation in a small browser but its very challenging to split screen on one monitor. I’m running a 15″ laptop and this was a challenge if you’re running a 17″ this can still be a challenge so ensure you choose wisely on that setup.

Commands to live by for the test

export do="--dry-run=client -o yaml"
kubectl run <image> --dry-run=client -o yaml > file.yaml #this is a lifesaver
journalctl -u kubelet.service #if kubelet is acting up this can be a quick way
whereis <insert> #to quickly find a service
systemctl status kubelet #to identify if kubelet is healthy
kubectl get pods -A #list all pods 
kubectl get pods | grep <insert command> # quickly grab info when needed

Now you’ll likely encounter most of these in practice exams but the idea is to use as many short hand imperative commands rather then declarative commands as time is not on your side its very easy to lose track of time when you are running through the problem sets.

So for the first exam attempt I spent too much time on question sets that took steps that were time consuming and to double verify and check my work this tremendously affected my time and I didn’t do well I believe I did 48% on first attempt.

Second attempt took on the two hours went straight for any questions that were challenging and saved the easiest questions for last as I knew those wouldn’t take much time or I deemed they wouldn’t be in nature. Still to no avail I ran out of time and wasn’t able to crack it this lead to the third attempt begrudgingly after I’ve invested quite some time in learning I wasn’t going to let this slip by me. Which was interrupted by network issues that essentially derailed the exam half-way through to reschedule.

All this to say if your going to take this exam I can emphasize practice command line daily if possible because if your not doing this day-to-day this will be much more challenging and naturally you’ll likely reference docs as you’re learning. Many people including myself use documentation daily and understanding where and how to look for information is pivotal such as using a side-car container in a pod to run a command, working with persistent volumes in a pod etc. Hopefully this will help you start on your journey to cloud native technologies and I will write further as I’m preparing for CKS and KCNA concurrently.