CKAD Preparation

Lately I've been receiving many requests on sharing useful tips to CKAD exam preparation. Below are several ones which I've ordered from MOST significant to LEAST significant in order of importance.

1. Time Management Tips

The most difficult part of the exam is the time constraint. You are given 2 hours to solve 19 questions that are quite lengthy. Here are the tips that help you use time more wisely:

1.1. Resist the urge to answer the questions sequentially!

Every question has a different weight. The exam gives you the possibility to flag any question and come back to it later at any time - use it. My advice is to solve the easiest questions before going full-speed to the hardest ones. Personally, I followed 2 simple rules:

• If I saw a question and its solution wasn't on the top of my mind - I moved to the next one regardless of the question weight.
• If I spent more than 2 minutes on tasks that had <3%, I moved to the next one.

1.2. Use bash aliases!

Note that a simulation environment (embedded CLI) will be provided. That means you won't have any shortcuts. The first thing to do is to quickly add few important aliases to ~/.bashrc. You do that - you save a significant amount of time. Here are the ones I used:

Certainly, you can add more, but mind the time tracker! If you ask me, the first two is already enough to hit the ground running.

1.3. (!!) Master imperative commands!

It's all about time. And the time it takes to create a kubernetes object in a declarative way is ridiculous. Here is the golden rule:

DON'T WRITE YAML FILES FROM SCRATCH - USE IMPERATIVES!

2. K8s Docs & Notepad Tips

2.1. Use official documentation when certain

Open book exam means you have one open tab for the official K8s documentation. At first, it can seem like a very useless exam supplement (k8s docs look like a black hole), but if you know where to find what, it can truly give you a good advantage.

I used the documentation just once, and just because I was ridiculously lazy to manually write nodeAffinity in the Pod's def file. I guess what I am trying to say here is:

DO NOT USE THE OFFICIAL K8 DOCUMENTATION - UNLESS YOU KNOW THE EXACT LOCATION OF WHAT YOU NEED.

Hence, my tip is to ONLY use K8s docs when preparing for CKAD exam. No stack overflow or other resources, especially during debugging.

2.2. Use Notepad wisely

You will be provided with an embedded Notepad. You can use it wisely, i.e. note down the question number and its weightage in case you want to skip it. Doing this will help you to prioritize questions that are left unsolved in the end.

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3. Cheat Sheet

During my preparation, I've composed a Kubernetes cheat sheet that significantly helped me in making the exam score over 90%.

The first cheat sheet is about creating stuff in Kubernetes cluster. Here, note that both imperative and declarative commands are present. The former one saves a lot of time.

The second cheat sheet is about exploring, adjusting or deleting stuff that are already present in Kubernetes cluster.

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You can also download full PDF here.

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[ USEFUL LINKS ] 

EXAM INFO: 

1. https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/tips-cka-and-ckad#exam-technical-instructions
2. https://devopscube.com/ckad-exam-updates/

PRACTICE TESTS:

1. https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises
2. https://killer.sh/

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