Developer Diary >_

I faced the CKA exam on 30th May 2023 and passed. So, now I'm a CKA. As I posted on the CKAD exam, I am doing the same thing for CKA in this post. You can check the Credly Badge I received for my CKA certificate.

Knowledge you need before facing the exam

• For the CKAD exam, all you need is kubectl to interact with the k8s cluster setup. But for the CKA exam, you need knowledge about kubeadm the k8s cluster bootstrapping tool, and kubelet the agent on each node which schedules the Pods in nodes, and etcdctl to interact with k8s cluster data store etcd.
• It's better to have hands-on experience in setting up a k8s cluster from scratch. You can do that in a cloud infrastructure of your choice. I could get that experience while setting up my home cluster. Recently, I had to redo it as my cp node's SD card started to malfunction. Now I think it happened for a reason. Back to the original point, Actually, the exam doesn't ask you to set up a whole cluster as it will take more time. And as I experienced in the exam, it gave the parts of the cluster setting up the task as some of the questions.
• You can refer to the K8s documentation for further information during the exam same as with the CKAD exam.
• Remember to do all the Lab exercises in the LFD-258 course. It will take some time, but you need that knowledge as the exam is also a practical test.

Taking the exam

In the post about the CKAD exam, I mentioned that the exam is only available at midnight or early morning in Asia/Colombo time. I came to the wrong conclusion as per the time slots available there last December. But for the CKA exam, I could reserve a time slot around 11.00 am in Asia/Colombo time zone. So, it was pretty convenient for me to take the exam at a time when I'm supposed to be awake.

That's it for this post! Short Huh? Short and sweet : )