CKAD Exam Preparation

November 7, 2020

Software

Tech, Kubernetes, CKAD

The process #

Study #

Took Mumshad’s super popular CKAD preparation course. It introduced the relevant kubernetes concepts and the labs at the end of each section were great for reinforcing the material. At $20 the course was a steal 🔥🔥🔥. This was the only resource I used and I passed the exam 🎉.

Practice #

From reading about the exam online and from the mock exams in Mumshad’s course, I realized that the exam is not hard but you have to be fast. The exam is a practical one and not a theoretical one. While I understood the concepts I was very very slow in the mock exams and was never passing. I had to make the following changes (these tips were from the course and interwebs);

use the imperative kubectl create resource-to-be-create rather than the declarative one.
memorize a few common tidbits (eg. defining a volume on a pod and mounting it at some path in the container)
practice practice practice -I did prep exams in Mumshad’s course a few times and got progressively faster

Exam #

Use bookmarks #

The exam setup allows you to have 2 tabs open, one for the exam and one for referring to allowed sites such as kubernetes docs. On a smart friend’s suggestion, I bookmarked useful doc pages, github examples so I was 1 click away from what I needed rather than searching->filtering-navigating to find the right info. For advanced mode, you can also change your browser search to search through your bookmarks.

Setup your exam terminal #

improve my vim setup (it helps in copying yaml from the docs)

  ~/.vimrc file with the following content:
  :set nu #show line numbers
  :set et #expand-tab
  :set sw=2 ts=2 sts=2 # shift-width  tab-stop soft-tab-stop

and using :retab

use shortcuts

alias k=kubectl
export do="--dry-run=client -o yaml" # `k create deployment bar --image foo $do > bar.yaml` to get a yaml file to start modifying

Organize your answers #

Create folders in your exam shell for each question to a clean and organized directory to save and edit yaml files. This will make it easy to come back to questions when re-attempting them.