- Intro to CKA:
The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification course is designed to validate the skills and knowledge of professionals who work with Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
The CKA certification is offered by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is widely recognized in the industry. The course covers a range of topics, including:
– Cluster Architecture, Installation, and Configuration: Understanding the components of a Kubernetes cluster, how to install and configure them.
– Workloads and Scheduling: Deploying and managing applications using Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments, and StatefulSets. Understanding how to schedule and scale applications.
– Services and Networking: Configuring and managing networking in a Kubernetes cluster. Exposing applications outside the cluster, setting up services, and understanding network policies.
– Storage: Managing storage for applications in a Kubernetes cluster, including persistent volumes and persistent volume claims.
– Troubleshooting: Diagnosing and resolving issues in a Kubernetes cluster. Identifying common problems and troubleshooting application and cluster-related issues.
– Security: Implementing and managing security policies. Securing the cluster, applications, and container environments.
– Cluster Maintenance: Performing cluster maintenance tasks such as upgrading Kubernetes, backing up and restoring etcd, and managing node operations.
The CKA certification is a performance-based exam where candidates are required to solve real-world problems in a live Kubernetes environment. It is essential for individuals who want to demonstrate their expertise in Kubernetes administration and contribute to the growing field of container orchestration and management.
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam Details:
- Storage part 10%:
- Understand storage classes, persistent volumes
- Understand volume mode, access modes and reclaim policies for volumes
- Understand persistent volume claims primitive
- Know how to configure applications with persistent storage
- Troubleshooting part 30%
- Evaluate cluster and node logging
- Understand how to monitor applications
- Manage container stdout & stderr logs
- Troubleshoot application failure
- Troubleshoot cluster component failure
- Troubleshoot networking
- Workloads & Scheduling part 15%
- Understand deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks
- Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications
- Know how to scale applications
- Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments
- Understand how resource limits can affect Pod scheduling
- Awareness of manifest management and common templating tools
- Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration 25%
- Manage role based access control (RBAC)
- Use Kubeadm to install a basic cluster
- Manage a highly-available Kubernetes cluster
- Provision underlying infrastructure to deploy a Kubernetes cluster
- Perform a version upgrade on a Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm
- Implement etcd backup and restore
- Services & Networking part 20%
- Understand host networking configuration on the cluster nodes
- Understand connectivity between Pods
- Understand ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
- Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources
- Know how to configure and use CoreDNS
- Choose an appropriate container network interface plugin
Exam Details & Resources
This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple tasks from a command line running Kubernetes.
Candidates have 2 hours to complete the tasks.
Candidates who register for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam will have 2 attempts (per exam registration) to an exam simulator, provided by Killer.sh.
The exam is based on Kubernetes v1.28
The CKA exam environment will be aligned with the most recent K8s minor version within approximately 4 to 8 weeks of the K8s release date
Some references as below:
- CKA: https://www.cncf.io/certification/cka/
- Exam Candidate Handbook: https://www.cncf.io/certification/candidate-handbook
- Exam Tips: http://training.linuxfoundation.org/go//Important-Tips-CKA-CKAD
- Exam Topics: https://github.com/cncf/curriculum
