MY CKAD JOURNEY: LEARNING AND SHARING IS GROWTH
I would like to share my learning experience from CKAD journey and this blog will help others who are interested in CKAD certification.
Do you need prior working experience on Dockers and Kubernetes before appearing for this exam ?
It is good to have working experience in Dockers and Kubernetes but this is not a mandate and you can appear for this exam even if you don’t have working experience in Dockers and Kubernetes.
Why I have chosen CKAD first before CKA or CKS and if you might be thinking CKAD is first level of Kubernetes certification program, so this is your misunderstanding and for CKAD you need more practice and strong reading and interpretation skills to attempt them in two hours and most of the questions are too big to read and understand them.
These three Kubernetes certificates cover different aspects of Kubernetes roles in the industry. CKA focuses more on “Master Node” and “Administration” of cluster and CKS focus on specialization in Kubernetes security.
This depends on what roles you are looking for and especially if you are working in Cloud Kubernetes, this adds more value if you are going with CKAD first and later, you can think about CKA and CKS.
Cloud providers GCP, AWS and Azure are offering Kubernetes as infrastructure as service and platform as service.
This means cloud providers take complete control of Kubernetes Master server and your half of Kubernetes cluster management job is reduced and you just have to create cluster from cloud provider and worker nodes create in your project VPC network and master nodes create in cloud provider VPC network and it connects with each other via VPC peering between your project VPC network where your worker nodes are running and cloud provider VPC network where your master nodes are running.
Therefore, it is better to learn Kubernetes from an application developer perspective if you are working on cloud providers kubernetes projects.
This is practical exam and you need strong practice on below concepts to appear for this exam.
Pod Design Pattern,
Replica Set,
Deployment,
Service- ClusterIP, NodePort and Load Balancer,
Service-account,
Volumes,
Persistent-Volume,
PersistentVolumeClaim,
Roles, Cluster Roles and Binding,
Multi-Container Pod Design Pattern:
- Sidecar Pattern:
- Adapter Pattern:
- Ambassador Pattern:
Logging and Monitoring,
Taints and Toleration,
Readiness and Liveness Probe,
Jobs and Cronjobs
You will get 19 questions in the exam with different weightage and you have to solve those questions in two hours and it is impossible to finish in two hours until you have practiced a lot, good in time management and good at reading.
These are different weightage questions and first 10 questions has less weightage and remaining questions has highest weightage and your focus should be on highest weightage questions to pass this exam.
Don't waste time if you get stuck in any question, just flag it and move ahead otherwise you will lose time and don't get time to solve other questions which you could have attempted without trouble.
You have to learn to build kubernetes objects using kubectl command and in some case this is not possible, you have to stick with yaml definition but this increase your speed if you know how to create or update resource using kubectl command wherever it is possible.
You are allowed to access kubernetes.io docs in one tab but this takes time if you don’t know how to quickly search specific yaml syntax. I am not asking to remember each and every syntax of yaml definition but this is good to know some of the them like creating volumes, volume-mounts and environment variable with config-map and secrets.
You need to understand difference between map and array objects and this is most confusing when you are preparing yaml definition while mounting multiple volumes to same container inside single pod and both config-map and secrets as environment variable to same container inside single pod.
This example gives some understanding on it.
volumes:
- name: shared-vol
emptyDir: {}
- name: config-volume
configMap:
name: special-config
- name: secret-volume
secret:
secretName: mysecretThen mount the above config-volume in the container
volumeMounts:
- name: shared-vol
mountPath: /tmp/logs
- name: config-volume
mountPath: /etc/config
- name: secret-volume
mountPath: /etc/configPrerequisite:
You need basic understanding on YAML, Unix Commands and Dockers.
Sources for preparation:
You can purchase Mumshad Mannambeth Kubernete course - Certified Kubernete Application Developer preparation from Udemy and this course contain practical labs for each above concepts and some of the lighting labs and mock test and practice it until you get 100% score in both lighting labs and mock test. Another best side of this course, they have slack channel and there are more than 15000 members of this group and kodekloud team are helping to public queries and you can raise your doubts and you get active response from kodekloud team and you can understand others doubts.
For me this slack channel helped lot for CKAD exam preparation.
You have to practice from below sites at least two to three times before going for exam.
kloudnative lab - This lab gives real environment like feeling:
https://kloudnative.blogspot.com/2020/09/ckad-certification-exam-preparation.html
150 Questions from Medium blogs:
GitHub Practice Questions:
https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises
To understand service in depth and practice it:
https://learnk8s.io/troubleshooting-deployments
Note: In every question, you must need to use -n <namespace> to run/create pods/deployments in the namespace mentioned in the question. If you don’t use -n <namespace> option, it will get created in another/current namespace and your question will not get evaluated. So try to practice questions with this -n option for particular namespaces.
I hope you’ll find this information useful to start your journey towards CKAD Certification.
For any query, you can reach out to me via:
- Email: 1987basav@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/basavraj-nilkanthe-22b89a194
