Preparing for CKAD in 1 week!!

Hi Folks,

I will be sharing my experience on how I prepared and passed the CKAD exam in a week !! I had some experience with K8s on AWS as well as GCP with the basic kubectl commands. I had an idea about pods, deployments, and services. But K8s isn't just about these three objects (or resources); it's way beyond that. And that is how CKAD comes into the picture where we work with all the different resources defined in K8s like secrets, configmaps, Network Policies, and so on.

Prereqs from your end before starting the preparation:-

1. Knowledge on K8s basics
2. Hands-on experience on using the K8s
3. Good grip on Linux commands and the Vim editor

This exam tests your ability to deploy complex applications using the different K8s objects. CKAD syllabus contains different sections as defined in the CNCF Curriculum.

Important things to note about the CKAD exam:-

• Practical hands-on exam (Around 19–20 tasks/questions with subtasks)
• Free retake within 12 months from 1st attempt
• Duration — 2 hours

Some shortcuts that are important during the exam:-

1. dd → to delete a line in a file using vim editor
2. Shift + C → to delete characters after the cursor for the current line
3. Using alias in K8s kubectl by running the command → alias kk='kubectl'
4. Explaining every resource for validating the syntax → kubectl explain <resource_type> —-recursive

Resources that were very handy and very useful:-

1. Udemy Course by Mumshad Mannambeth
2. CKAD Exercises by dgkanatsios
3. kubectl commands reference from official K8s docs
4. CKAD Notes — refer to this when in doubt of where to start from
5. VIM cheat sheet → with all vim shortcuts

These resources have been my guru mantra for cracking the CKAD exam in a week. The Udemy Course not only contains videos explaining K8s theory but also gives us access to KodeKloud Labs for practice sessions. The questions framed in each of these sessions cover all the necessary aspects of a given resource giving a clearer idea. Apart from this, there are 2 timed mock tests as well included in the Udemy course to practice and ace yourself for the exam.