Passing the CKA in 30 days or less, a practical guide.

Thanks for taking the time to drop by, I wish you the best on your journey to achieving your CKA. I’m a solutions architect specializing in Kubernetes at VMware. I see a lot of great information on what classes to take, and what resources are valuable. However, a thought a breakdown of my schedule would be helpful as it’s something I didn’t find when preparing for the exam.

PS:

I’ve provided a list of bookmark’s I would recommend importing to your profile. I found that invaluable when taking the exam. It was given to me by a friend and I’ve exanded and modified it to be easily quired during both the preparation and exam portion of your journey.

Schedule

I spent between 1 and 2 hours each weekday, and 3-4 hour grind sessions on the weekends to ensure I was well prepared for the CKA. Here’s a rough breakdown of my exam prep schedule broken down by weeks.

NOTE:

For each section, I used the Kode labs provided with Mumshad’s class as well as the corresponding labs in the same topic category on A Cloud Guru. I recommend saving the Cloud Guru sections for your weekend study sessions as a nice refresher of the week’s topics to help solidify core concepts.

Week 1

• Core Concepts
• Scheduling
• Logging and monitoring
• Application Lifecycle Management

Week 2

• Cluster Maintenance
• Security
• Storage
• End of week 2
  • Schedule exam 2 weeks out
    • Can always move this at the end of week 4 if you’re not feeling confident.
  • First attempt at Killer SH

Week 3

• Networking
• Installing and upgrading k8s with Kubeadm
• Backing up and restoring ETCD

Week 4

• Mumshad exams
  • Lightning Labs
  • Mock Exam 1
  • Mock Exam 2
  • Mock Exam 3
  • Killer.sh CKA exam
• Killer.sh CKA exam 2nd attempt

Resources

Practical training

The best part about the CKA is that it’s a practical exam, meaning questions are designed to test your knowledge and understanding of the Kubernetes platform. A good mix of both practical training, I found Kode Cloud’s and a Cloud Guru’s environment training to be the most useful.

NOTE:

You don’t need to purchase a Cloud Guru training to follow this guide, you can just redo the Kode Cloud training, I found it helpful to have access to different scenarios, however.

From basic to best practice

When it comes to understanding the basics, I found Mumshad’s training to be the best return on investment. His course also comes with an access code to the practical training in Kode Cloud’s labs. As far as secondary resources I found Cloud Guru to be lackluster at best, I’d recommend spending your excess time traversing the Kubernetes docs to have great tutorials to help you solidify your understanding

NOTE:

I recommend watching all videos at 2x speed, keeping notes in your preferred note app, and recapping topics that aren’t sitting well on the weekends.

Practice Exams

There is grand total of 4 practice exams that come with Mumshad’s class so be sure to complete those before venturing to the next step. Once completed and you can consistently pass with at least an 80% I’d recommend scheduling your CKA exam. This will give you access to 2 instances of the Killer.sh CKA prep exam. This practice test can be accessed through the Linux Foundation portal under the schedule exam section. There are two attempts at this practice exam and can be used as a final assessment in ensuring you’re prepared for the exam.

NOTE:

If you schedule your exam at least 2 weeks prior to taking your exam you can take your first attempt at Killer.sh’s the environment at the end of week 2. You should have enough experience at this point to push your way through at least half the exam, as well as give yourself exposure to the exam format. This lets you understand what to focus on going into week 3, as well as start preparing you for the practice exams during the final week of prep.

Short cuts

• The Kubernetes cheat sheet
• export do=”--dry-run -o yaml
• A set of useful bookmarks I used to help streamline searches during the exam.

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