CKA Exam Sharing

Register and Pay for the exam

CKA official page:
https://www.cncf.io/certification/cka/
You need to register a new user and log in.

I used VMware 2021 50% discount code: VMw0824certXXX. It expired recently.
But I don’t know the discount code for 2022.

If you finished the payment for the exam. You can book your exam in 12 months.

Prepare for the exam

In order to pass the exam, you need to study Kubernetes basic knowledge. What’s basic knowledge? It means we don’t need to know the underlying complicated source code of the container and k8s. We just spend time understanding container and K8s architecture and how to interact with them, finally we are going to be qualified administrators of K8S.
Two courses I watched before the exam:

1. Kubernetes Deep Dive (Mandarin)
   https://time.geekbang.org/column/intro/100015201?tab=catalog
   This course is a blog with webpage text and audio. The author is a famous co-maintainer of Kubernetes community, and co-chair of CNCF App Delivery SIG. He is also one of five new members of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) in 2021.
2. Certified Kubernetes Administrator from OReilly(English)
   https://learning.oreilly.com/videos/certified-kubernetes-administrator/9780136677482/
   The course includes labs, demonstrations, and lightboard explanations by Sander van Vugt. If you have OReilly membership, I highly recommend you watch this course.

Key knowledge of CKA

The CKA exam only verifies your basic K8S knowledge. The key topics I consolidated as below.

• Basic container knowledge. What’s a container and how does it works, especially a Docker container.
• K8S architect. Master nodes and Worker nodes.
• Understand the concept of Pod. Use pod to create a sample application. How to edit the pod yaml file and use kubectl apply -f xxx.yaml to schedule your pod on your K8S cluster.
• Understand the concept of Deployment, Statefulset, Job, Cronjob, etc. This is the essence of K8S. How to scale a deployment to multiple pods.
• Concept about the storage of K8S. How to mount a volume for your container in a Pod. How do set your pods to share a volume?
• Understand the networking of K8S. You need to know CNI concept and use Flannel or other networking plug-ins to build your K8S cluster networking stack.
• Service of K8S. Understand the K8S internal service, load-balancing, and DNS discovery mechanism. Know how to expose your service using NodePort.
• Network policies. You need to create a network policy yaml file to define ingress/egress policies to limit the traffic between pods.
• K8S logs. How to use kubectl logs to retrieve pod or container logs for troubleshooting.
• K8S upgrade process. Use Linux command line to upgrade your K8S cluster. The exam environment is Ubuntu 18.0.4.
• Troubleshooting for your master nodes and worker nodes.
  Before you take the exam, you should be very familiar with Linux command line and be very proficient with the Linux VI editor.

The process of taking the exam

After you schedule the exam on the CNCF My Portal, an email will be sent to you before the exam. You can log in to the portal and start the exam on time.
Before starting the exam, you need to run a compatibility check to verify your bandwidth, Chrome plug-in for the remote exam.
On the exam portal, the proctor with chat with you:

1. Compatibility check
2. Close all the applications on your computer except Chrome. Open the remote monitoring functions following the proctor’s guidance.
3. You are only allowed to open two tabs in your Chrome. One is for the console of the exam, another is for the online doc of K8S(kubernetes.io/docs). You can refer to the official K8S doc website and edit your yaml files for the questions.
4. Prepare your ID for the check. A passport is necessary.
5. Start your exam. It’s a web console, on the left is the question, on the right, it’s a command-line interface. you can input your answer on the right side.
6. You must carefully execute your inputs in the command line, when you finish each question, you can switch to the next one. This exam includes 16 questions.
7. You will have 2 hours to finish the exam. When you finished you can check your answer. Once finished, you can chat with the proctor, he/she will close your exam and submit the exam result.

The result will send to you within 24 hours after you finished the exam. If you passed the exam, you can see your score. Finally, you will receive your certificate.