CKA Exam Preparation guide
Published: 2020-08-15 15:18:31

This prep exam will help prepare you for the type of questions you will encounter, as well as the timed environment of the actual exam.

If you are studying for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam.

The questions on this exam focus on the CKA curriculum categories listed below:

CKA Exam Pattern and Tips:
CKA requires you to solve 24 questions in 3 hours.
CKA exam curriculum includes these general domains and their weights on the exam:
Application Lifecycle Management – 8%
Installation, Configuration & Validation – 12%
Core Concepts – 19%
Networking – 11%
Scheduling – 5%
Security – 12%
Cluster Maintenance – 11%
Logging / Monitoring – 5%
Storage – 7%
Troubleshooting – 10%

Each domain has the same level of emphasis as it will on the official exam.
Exam questions can be attempted in any order and doesn’t have to be sequential.
Each exam question carries a weight so be sure you attempt the exams with higher weights before focusing on the lower ones. So target the ones with higher weights and quicker solutions like debugging ones.
6-8 different K8s clusters are provisioned. Each question refers to a different kubernetes cluster, and the context needs to be switched. Be sure to execute the kubectl use context command, which is available with every question and you just need to copy paste it.
Check for the namespace mentioned in the question, to find resources and create resources. Use the -n <namespace>
You would be performing most of the interaction from base node. However, pay attention to check for the node you need to execute the exams and make sure you return back to the base node.
SSH to nodes and gaining root access is allowed, if needed. Commands are provided. Make sure you use the sudo -i command for running docker commands.
Read carefully the Information provided within the questions with the i mark. They would provide very useful hints in addressing the question and save time. for e.g. namespaces to look into. for a failed pod, what has already been created like configmap, secrets, network policies so that you do not create the same.
CKA was already upgraded to use k8s 1.18 version and kubectl run commands did not work for me. Use kubectl create commands to create deployments.
Make sure you know the imperative commands to create resources, as you won’t have time to time to create and edit yaml files.
If you need to edit further use --dry-run -o yaml to get a headstart with spec yaml file and edit the same.
I personally use alias kk=kubectl to avoid typing kubectl

CKA Key Topics
Application Lifecycle Management
Understand deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks. Practice kubectl rollout commands to check status and undo deployments.
Know how to scale and create self-healing applications using replicas
Understand Init Containers and usage
Installation, Configuration & Validation
Practice creating kubernetes Cluster using Kubeadm
Configure secure cluster communications
Configure a highly-available Kubernetes cluster
Perform cluster management. Drain, Cordon and Uncordon nodes.
Core Concepts
Understand the Kubernetes API primitives, cluster architecture, Services and other network primitives
Know how to create namespaces, pods, describe pods
Know how to export the pods spec as yaml/json file kubectl get pod pod_name -o json|yaml
Know how to create deployments and expose services
Know how to Create a multi container pod
Practice how to filter the records using label selectors.
Practice Output formatting using jsonpath. Practice jsonpath samples.
Know how to monitor consumed CPU and Memory resources.
Networking
Understand the networking configuration on the cluster nodes
Understand Pod networking concepts
Understand Service Networking and practice how to expose pod and. deployments as service.
Know Ingress and how to use Ingress rules
Practice DNS for Services and Pods using nslookup
Scheduling
Understand label selectors to schedule Pods on nodes using nodeSelector and Practice Assign Pod Nodes
Understand DaemonSets and how to provision. Remember there is no imperative way to create DaemonSet, so either create a deployment and filter of copy from the documentation.
Understand how resource limits can affect Pod scheduling
Understand how to run multiple schedulers and how to configure Pods to use them
Practice how to Create Static Pods esp. on worker nodes. Static pods can be configured using yaml files located in staticPodPath referred by the kube-apiserver. Make sure the property is defined.
Security
Know how to configure authentication and authorization using CertificateSigningRequest and RBAC authorization
Know how to configure network policies
Practice manage TLS certificates in a Cluster
Work with images securely using private repository
Define security contexts
Secure persistent key value store using Secrets. Practice passing Secrets to Pods using Volumes and Environment variables.
Cluster Maintenance
Understand Kubernetes cluster upgrade process
Implement backup and restore methodologies
Make sure you read ETCD backup and practice using documentation
Facilitate operating system upgrades
Logging / Monitoring
Understand and know how to monitor all cluster components, applications, cluster and application logs
Know resource usage monitoring as you would be needed to check resource usage using the kubectl top command
Know how to Debug running pods using the kubectl logs command
Storage
Understand and focus on creating Persistent Volumes, Persistent Volume Claims and associating them with Pods
Practice Configure a Pod to Use a Volume for Storage – focus on using Empty Dir as the volume, so the storage is ephemeral to pod.
Practice Configure Pod Container Persistent Volume Storage – focus on creating Pods with host path volumes
Exam does not cover other other volume types or storage class.
Troubleshooting
Practice Debug application for troubleshooting application failures
Practice Debug cluster for troubleshooting control plane failure and worker node failure.
Understand the control plane architecture.
Focus on kube-apiserver, static pod config which causes the control panel pods to be referred and deployed.
Check pods in kube-system if they are all running. Use docker ps -a command on the node to inspect the reason for exiting containers.
Check kubelet service if the worker node is shown not ready
Troubleshoot networking

#Exam Score

In order to pass this prep exam, you will need both of the following:

A minimum score of 70 percent on the overall exam
A minimum score of 33 percent on each exam domain
Completing the Exam:

You can spend as long as you wish on any particular question but must budget your time to complete all the questions. Any questions not completed in the allotted time will be scored as incorrect.

During the session, you may skip questions and return to them later in the session. You can also review your answers to previous questions, and change them at any point during the exam session.

You can end your exam session by submitting your exam for a score, or by discarding your exam.

Submitting Your Exam
You may submit your exam at any time by clicking "Submit Exam" and confirming your choice. Once confirmed, this completes the entire exam session. All of your answers will be scored, and your Skill Score will be updated. All unanswered questions will be scored as incorrect. You cannot return later to complete any unanswered questions.
Discarding Your Exam
You may discard your exam at any time by clicking "Discard Exam" and confirming your choice. Once confirmed, your exam session will be closed without saving your exam progress. None of your answers will be scored, and your Skill Score will not be updated. When you return to complete the exam, you will begin an entirely new exam session which may include new exam questions.