Practice. Practice. Practice.
I have tried to keep the info limited to what worked for me, as we already have enough guidance on the internet for CKA.
I think the key is Practice because based on my experience the exam is challenging but I didn’t find the exam really difficult. In fact, I attempted the questions I knew in 1.5 hours and spent remaining 30 minutes on review and solving Network Policy and Troubleshooting related questions.
Prior experience:
I am new to OSS world, started working on Linux and Kubernetes Instance in last 1 year. You can read about my kickstart to K8s journey here.
My Prep Material:
- Mumshad CKA Course
- Mumshad Kubernetes the hard way Repo and Tutorial (Did this setup on my laptop and used it as my playground for 2 weeks, deploy the cluster, break the cluster, fix the cluster, and again.. )
- Walid Shaari CKA Repo
Tips:
- We got 17 questions in 2 hours, quickly go through all the questions. This is to finish the easy once first. Trust me this helps you to gain confidence that you already passed and now aiming for the dream century (100%)
- Imperative commands are the key to save on time
- kubernetes.io/docs was my only friend present during the exam, know it well before the exam. I bookmarked the pages I needed to save seconds on searching.
- For etcd backup and restore -h (help) in the key. (Practice before the exam)
- Not required but if you are planning to use aliases, make sure you practice them before so your brain is trained to use them. I did set below aliases but hardly used few.
- Used Kubectl Cheat Sheet for these.
- source <(kubectl completion bash)
- echo “source <(kubectl completion bash)” >> ~/.bashrc
- alias k=kubectl
- complete -F __start_kubectl k
- Typed these.
- alias kgp=’k get pods’
- alias kgs=’k get service’
- alias kaf=’k apply -f’
- alias kgd=’k get deployments’
- Tweak Vim
- vim ~/.vimrc
set nu
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=2
set tabstop=2
- vim ~/.vimrc
- Used Kubectl Cheat Sheet for these.
- Last but not least, always validate the output. Describe Pods, deployments, services etc to make sure it’s working as expected
What could have gone better:
- More Practice, its never enough
- Practice Network Policy more. So you please don’t miss it and follow this amazing repo. Try to implement all the scenarios in your cluster to get a better understanding.
- More troubleshooting practice to understand the kind of issues kubelet and kube proxy can have.
- Practice with systemctl, journalctl and openssl
And as we have 2 attempts, I would suggest rather fail fast than waiting till you are ready for the exam. Best of luck.
