Exams Vouchers: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

CKA was created by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a part of their ongoing effort to help develop the Kubernetes ecosystem. The exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple tasks from a command line running Kubernetes.

This certification is for Kubernetes administrators, cloud administrators and other IT professionals who manage Kubernetes instances.

A certified K8s administrator has demonstrated the ability to do basic installation as well as configuring and managing production-grade Kubernetes clusters. They will have an understanding of key concepts such as Kubernetes networking, storage, security, maintenance, logging and monitoring, application lifecycle, troubleshooting, API object primitives and the ability to establish basic use-cases for end users.

This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple tasks from a command line running Kubernetes. Candidates have 2 hours to complete the tasks.The exam is based on Kubernetes v1.25.

Storage - 10%

• Understand storage classes, persistent volumes
• Understand volume mode, access modes and reclaim policies for volumes
• Understand persistent volume claims primitive
• Know how to configure applications with persistent storage

Troubleshooting - 30%

• Evaluate cluster and node logging
• Understand how to monitor applications
• Manage container stdout & stderr logs
• Troubleshoot application failure
• Troubleshoot cluster component failure
• Troubleshoot networking

Workloads and Scheduling - 15%

• Understand deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks
• Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications
• Know how to scale applications
• Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments
• Understand how resource limits can affect Pod scheduling
• Awareness of manifest management and common templating tools

Cluster Architecture, Installation and Configuration - 25%

• Manage role based access control (RBAC)
• Use Kubeadm to install a basic cluster
• Manage a highly-available Kubernetes cluster
• Provision underlying infrastructure to deploy a Kubernetes cluster
• Perform a version upgrade on a Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm
• Implement etcd backup and restore

Services and Networking - 20%

• Understand host networking configuration on the cluster nodes
• Understand connectivity between Pods
• Understand ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
• Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources
• Know how to configure and use CoreDNS
• Choose an appropriate container network interface plugin