Certified Kubernetes Administrator

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam focuses on assessing your ability to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of a Kubernetes administrator. The CKA curriculum is well-defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and typically includes the following core domains:

Exam Domain

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

Storage (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

Services & Networking (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

Workloads & Scheduling (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

Troubleshooting (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

Preparation Materials

• Documentation: The Kubernetes official docs https://kubernetes.io/docs/ are essential for exam preparation.
• Labs: Hands-on practice with clusters using tools like Minikube, kind, or cloud services (e.g., GKE, AKS, EKS).

• Mock Exams: Practice scenarios from resources like Killer.sh (provided with CKA exam purchase) or other training platforms.

• Courses: Platforms like Linux Academy, Udemy, and KodeKloud offer comprehensive courses.

• Cheat Sheets: Have a curated list of kubectl commands for quick reference (available in official kubernetes documentation).

References

• https://trainingportal.linuxfoundation.org/courses/certified-kubernetes-administrator-cka