Before I begin giving out my study strategy and exam prep tips let me take this opportunity for doing a huge shout out to the folks at CNCF for doing a fantabulous job in devising such a practical and hands-on certification as compared to the MCQ format examinations. It’s also double sweet that I cleared it now without having to step out from the comfort of my home with the Corona pandemic sweeping across the world. Truly visionary indeed!

Categorizing the resources used by me for clearing the CKAD certification as Generic References, Specific Materials and Practice Areas for easy focus.

*** YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY ***

Generic References:

The most important thing is to live and breathe YAML syntax. It is the de-facto language for Kubernetes and understanding the nuances will help you go a long distance for the overall preparation. A ton of resources are available online and my favorite pick is the one from tutorialspoint.com

2. Get comfortable with vi/vim editor as you would be expected to tweak configurations of an existing pod/deployment/replicasets etc… and even create new definition files. Understand important shortcuts like deleting a line, copy pasting (yanking) and navigation. A example vim cheat-sheet

Having said that, you could use nano for editing by explicitly setting it - export KUBE_EDITOR=nano

PS: I recommend vim as it would definitely come in handy for you in future and not just for passing the CKAD examination.

3. Completely new to Kubernetes or want to refresh the basics again? I recommend enrolling for this FREE course by CNCF/Linux Foundation available at edx. This is a great primer before going deep into CKAD specifics.

Specific Materials:

The best and most economical course out there to help you for CKAD is the one from Mumshad Mannambeth available at Udemy. He explains the concepts very well and also comes with practice tests. A word of caution here about practice tests — the ones given are easy and hence you might want to rely on some external sample questions.

2. Learn to work in the imperative way. You will save tons of time by mastering the kubectl command line rather than relying on a YAML for each and every task. It will also help you extract out the info into a YAML definition for you to modify later.

3. Setting terminal/bash aliases will aid you by avoiding to type extra characters. You can easily set an alias like this: alias k=kubectl

In addition, kubectl provides multiple handy shortcuts like po (pods), rs (replicasets), deploy (deployments), netpol (network policies) etc… A sample usage will now looks like k get po to show all the pods instead of kubectl get pods. Less chars types == More time saved!

4. CKAD is an open book examination where you’re allowed to refer the official Kubernetes documentation. Get familiar with this and understand what needs to be searched and where to look while in doubt. The search-box on the top right of this page is your guiding light for this examination

5. kubectl explain -- recursive should be your default man page during the exam and also at the preparation time. Although you would be allowed to open an extra tab to bring up the official documentation, I honestly felt this better to search right there within the terminal as it’s an inbuilt documentation with syntax to check on the go. Learn to use and abuse this for your success.

Practice Areas:

CKAD is a hands-on exam and you need to know your shit right — PRACTICE. Bring up a minikube cluster setup on your system by following pretty straight forward installation instructions. You could also rely on GKE (GCP), EKS (AWS) or AKS (Azure) if you’re rich

2. If you had bought the course mentioned above from Udemy, it comes with practice tests that can be launched as many times as you want on kodekloud.com with a pre-provisioned cluster setup that stays active for 1 hour. You could use this as your practice playground as well.

3. Some great CKAD Exercises have been compiled here. Before you sit for the exam you should be able to solve all of this and must have attempted it more than 2 times. It is a great self-assessment of your preparedness.