Certified Kubernetes Application Developer — Tips to crack! | by Ajay Bhosale

Mar 29, 2020

3 min read

Certified Kubernetes Application Developer — How to crack!

I am happy to share that today I achieved my second Kubernetes certification. i.e. Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).

Honestly speaking, this one is easy to crack if you are already a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). Being a CKA and an experienced kubernetes professional, only thing I had to work on for achieving CKAD was time management.

CKAD exam consist of a set of 19 performance-based tasks to be solved on the command line within 2 hours. You have to very quick and familiar with kubectl operations to complete the exam in given time.

Resources:

Below listed is an excellent course by Mumshad Munnambeth. This course is sufficient enough to get you prepared & successfully clear CKAD exam. If you can complete the course labs without having to look at the hints, you are half prepared. Consider yourself fully prepared when you complete the lightning labs within given time. If you can’t, keep practicing, until you do. https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-application-developer/
Official Kubernetes documentation (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/) is also a key. Practice or go through CKAD exam relevant tasks at least once. Bookmark the K8S official documentation pages as per the curriculum. You are allowed to open one additional tab during the exam, so you can copy & paste stuff from official documentation.
Don’t waste your time practicing unnecessary set of questions out there on various blogs or repositories. Trust me it isn’t required, few of them include out of curriculum content as well. Instead keep practicing Mumshad course time and again, if required.

Tips & Tricks:

Every exam question will have a command at the beginning to set the context to a cluster on which task is to be performed. Ensure you run it without fail.
Check the weightage of the question before attempting. If it is a 2% or 3% weightage question and is lengthy enough to read and then perform, flag it for later. Also, flag the tougher ones or the ones you’re stuck at for later. Revisit flagged questions once you are done with attempting all the questions.
You only need to solve enough to gain the minimum required percentage to pass the exam so it is very important to attempt all of the questions. For the CKAD Exam, a score of 66% or above must be earned to pass.
Be really good with yaml. Spend enough time practicing the definition files, so you won’t get stuck with the indentation errors during the exam. Don’t write yaml files from scratch, use the imperative commands along with — dry-run -o yaml option to generate our yaml files.
You have to be good with vi editor as well, since most of the tasks will require editing of YAML files.
tmux is not required. Also, you don’t need to set a lot of aliases.
Practice performing tasks with imperative commands a lot. Imperative commands are a key to complete the exam in given time. Read each question carefully and accordingly run the imperative commands or create yaml definition files from it. For example, if you are specifically asked to run a pod with a command, ensure you don’t run it as an argument and vice versa.