Learning Kubernetes & prepare for certifications
These are some tips and advise for those who are interested in learning Kubernetes(K8s) and taking the certification exams. I learned K8s from scratch within 6 weeks and got certified with both CKA and CKAD exams with 94%, 89% marks. More than certification, it was really interesting to learn K8s concepts and gets good hands on experience on K8s.
I followed the course conducted by “mumshad mannambeth” and “KodeKloud” team who have done remarkable job of teaching K8s for beginners. Hence, these tips are mostly described around their courses and lab platform. Both CKA and CKAD are practical exams so that its vital to understand the basics concepts correctly and practice in a lab environment.
I started with “Certified Kubernetes Administrator with Practice Tests” course which has around 14 hours of video lectures. I watched everyone of them in 2x speed and was able to cover them within 8 hours. After each topic there are hands on Labs to perform which took around 30+ hours in overall to complete in first run.
- You have to use “Kubectl” command 95% of time so I created “alias k=kubectl” before start doing a lab. Make sure you practice labs with alias if you are planning to use them during exam. For me this alias was good enough to save some time during the exam.
- I referenced back to the K8s documentation while performing the each lab and book mark each section with short name for easy reference. This becomes handy during the exam because I knew exactly where to look for information.
3. Before start doing lightning labs or mock tests, I did all the labs for the second round. I didn’t use the hints provided in the labs on this round and performed them with the help of K8s documentation. I had to watch videos again to clarify and better understand some of the topics.
4. Thereafter I did the lightning labs and mock exams. I did them couple of times to make sure I get 100% marks within the given time.
5. I always generated the yaml definition files using the imperative commands and modified them. I was able to create all the basic objects (pods, deployments, services) without referring to the documentation. For the objects like configmaps, secrets, jobs, services, etc used the “k create <objectname> -h”. However, I used to reference back to documentation for objects like ingress, networkpolicy, etc where I copied the content of definition files and created the objects. Sometime alignment mismatches while copying the content but it can be easily fixed using visual mode (ctl+v, shift+i) commands in vim. So make sure you are comfortable with vim or any other cli editor.
6. If you are able to complete all the labs and mock exams without using given hints and within given time interval, then you are good to go for the exam.
Once I passed the CKA exam, I wanted to take the CKAD exam as well. Then I started following “Kubernetes Certified Application Developer with Tests” course which consists of 7 hours of video lectures. But 70% of topics were already covered on CKA course so I went through this course pretty fast. I used the same approach described above and I was able to complete the CKAD exam within 10 days after CKA.
Initially I had a second thought of spending another $200+ for CKAD exam because 70% topics already covered from CKA exam. But CKAD was more challenging in terms of time management where I had make sure I can create most of the objects using imperative commands. CKAD is only 2 hours compared to 3 hours for CKA. When I take the CKAD exam, I was able to create most of the objects without referring to the docs excepts jobs, cronjobs, ingress, affinity and etc. Finally this helped me to reassure my knowledge on K8s and boost my confidence of using K8s while gaining additional knowledge requires as a developer.
At last, this is how I prepared for the exam but it may not be relevant to others based on their preferences and technical background. Wish you good luck with learning K8s and get certified.
