CKA: Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Important links

From official source,

• Curriculum - https://github.com/cncf/curriculum
• Candidate handbook - https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/lf-candidate-handbook
• Exam tips - https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/tips-cka-and-ckad

Study materials

• https://github.com/alijahnas/CKA-practice-exercises

• https://github.com/kimdoanh89/CKA-exercises

I also recommend this awesome course taught by Mumshad. It is very popular and consists of many practice labs and mock exams.

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests

Key points

1. Be familiar with the basic Kubernetes resources

• Computing workloads: Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments, Jobs, CronJobs
• Configurations: Secrets, ConfigMaps
• Persistent volumes: StorageClasses, PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims
• Services and networking: Services, Ingress, NetworkPolicies
• User access control: Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, ClusterRoleBindings, ServiceAccounts

Note that most of these are also required for the CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) exam.

Check out my other CKAD post for more information.

2. Learn the following Kubernetes components

Control plane components

• kube-apiserver
• etcd
• kube-scheduler
• kube-controller-manager

Node components

• kubelet
• kube-proxy

3. Learn how to use these CLI tools

• kubeadm - tool to bootstrap the Kubernetes cluster
• etcdctl - CLI to interact with etcd data store
• crictl - CLI for CRI-compatible container runtimes

Bonus

Practise the following scenarios.

Note that these are NOT the actual exam questions but practice I found useful to go through.

• Generate and approve the CertificateSigningRequest
• Grant access to user using RBAC
• Update Kubernetes cluster eg control plane components
• Backup and restore etcd cluster
• Assign pods to specific nodes
• Create and terminate static pods