CKA Exam Overview

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification is recognized globally, vendor-neutral, and relevant across all industries. To attain the certification, the candidate must be capable of passing an exam on the following topics:

mindmap
  root((CKA Exam))
    Troubleshooting
    Cluster Architecture
    Services & Networking
    Workloads & Scheduling
    Storage

Storage 10%

Exam Topic Areas

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    Storage
      Persistence
        PV & PVC
        Storage Classes
      Lifecycle
        Reclaim Policies
        Access Modes
        Dynamic Provisioning

Exam Tutorials

• Implement storage classes and dynamic volume provisioning
• Configure volume types, access modes and reclaim policies
• Manage persistent volumes and persistent volume claims

Exam Comprehension

• How to define and apply storage PV + PVC
• Understand how to apply static storage
• Understand how to apply dynamic storage
• Gain comfort troubleshooting dynamic storage volumes

Troubleshooting 30%

Exam Topic Areas

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    Troubleshooting
      Cluster Components
        Kube-apiserver
        Scheduler
        Controller Manager
        etcd
      Nodes
        Kubelet status
        Container runtime (CRI)
        System logs (journalctl)
      Networking
        DNS (CoreDNS)
        Service connectivity
        Ingress/Gateway API

Exam Tutorials

• Troubleshoot clusters and nodes
• Troubleshoot cluster components
• Monitor cluster and application resource usage
• Manage and evaluate container output streams
• Troubleshoot services and networking

Exam Comprehension

• Communication basic of Services
• Establish Service for ClusterIP, NodePort and LoadBalancer
• High level understanding of Services traffic
• Ingress routing of traffic
• Access container logs
• How to install metric server
• Application troubleshooting basics
• Cluster troubleshooting essentials

Workloads & Scheduling 15%

Exam Topic Areas

mindmap
  Workloads & Scheduling
    Deployments
      Rolling Updates
      Rollbacks
    Config & Secrets
      ConfigMaps
      Secrets
    Placement
      Node Affinity
      Taints and Tolerations
      Resource Limits/Quotas

Exam Tutorials

• Understand application deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks
• Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications
• Configure workload autoscaling
• Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments
• Configure Pod admission and scheduling e.g. limits, node affinity, etc.

Exam Comprehension

• Understand how to scale deployments
• Understand how to perform rollout/rollback updates
• Learn how to create and use ConfigMaps
• Learn how to create and use Secrets (Literals/Files)
• Apply resource limits/quotas

Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration 25%

Exam Topic Areas

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  Cluster Architecture (25%)
    Installation
      Kubeadm (init/join)
      HA Control Plane
      Upgrades
    Infrastructure
      Backup & Restore (etcd)
      RBAC (Roles/Bindings)
      Certificates (TLS)
    Extensions
      CNI
      CSI
      Operators/CRDs

Exam Tutorials

• Manage role based access control (RBAC)
• Prepare underlying infrastructure for installing a Kubernetes cluster
• Create and manage Kubernetes clusters using kubeadm
• Manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters
• Implement and configure a highly-available control plane
• Use Helm and Kustomize to install cluster components
• Understand extension interfaces e.g, CNI, CSI, CRI, etc.
• Understand CRDs, install and configure operators

Exam Comprehension

• RBAC Roles for users, groups and ServiceAccounts - Super important to know!!!
• Initialise a cluster node - Know how to initialise a node and practice.
• Upgrade an existing cluster - Know where the documentation is and practice.
• Backup/Restore etcd - Know where the documentation is, use the correct path!

Services & Networking 20%

Exam Topic Areas

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  Services & Networking (20%)
    Connectivity
      Network Policies
      Pod-to-Pod traffic
    Exposure
      ClusterIP
      NodePort
      LoadBalancer
    Traffic Management
      Ingress Resources
      Gateway API
      CoreDNS configuration

Exam Tutorials

• Understand connectivity between Pods
• Define and enforce Network Policies
• Use ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
• Use the Gateway API to manage Ingress traffic
• Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources
• Understand and use CoreDNS

Exam Comprehension

• Service essentials for Pod communication
• Create and troubleshoot Service Types (e.g. ClusterIP, NodePort and LoadBalancer)
• Define difference for Service (Routing Internal e.g. Pods) vs Ingress (Routing External e.g. Cluster HTTP)