Hey. Still around? It’s been a minute since our last conversation, felt like updating you on my life. More like, I just passed the hardest exam I’ve ever had taken in my life. Seriously, this one made me question my life’s choices. So, what was the exam? What did it cover? How did I prepare? AND, what are my recommendations for you to pass?
Quick note about the exam, you need to have passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam first. After you pass the CKS, you extend how long your CKA is valid for. Below is a screenshot of the areas. covered in the exam.
Admin details of the exam:
time: 2 hours long
attempts: You get 2x for each purchase
remote: Yes, you have to take this from a remote location. You will need to take this in a room by yourself.
questions: 16 in total weight of questions: the questions vary from 4% to 6% to 11%, so spend your time wisely.
documentation available: Yes, you’re able to access only the below listed sources.
results: You will get the results 24 hours after completion of the exam.
My Advice:
Ensure that you have a mouse for faster COPY/PASTE actions during the exam. Don’t count on the key commands as they are different with the Virtual Machine given to you.
You will NOT be able to have a browser with preorganized bookmarks. There will be a virtual desktop that you can access to dive into the kubernetes documentation page.
Always, and I mean ALWAYS, ensure that when you’re working with the Kube API Yaml, you copy commands and file paths from the instructions to the file. Don’t think that in your tired state you’ll be able to remember every key.
Speed is the key, there is no time to get lost in a question. Look at each question and mark the questions you think will take longer than two min to fix.
When you move to a new question, ensure that you IMMEDIATELY switch contexts. From there, read the entire question as sometimes they will provide a pre-filled out template at the very bottom of the page.
When editing the KubeAPI config, ensure that you make a copy first. This will ensure that you’re prepared incase the worst happens.
Understand that because time is NOT on your side, you will need to cut corners for deploying/editing cluster info. Because of this, I encourage you to learn more Imperative Commands which you can reference the official kubernetes guide here.
Study Material
Killercoda
Killer.sh
KodeKloud
My Study Guide
KillerCoda gives you multiple scenarios where you can play around with kubectl in a sandbox environment.
Killer.sh provides you a practice test where you can see how you fair with 2 hours to complete the exam.
KodeKloud is what I used for this and my CKA. What their team provides are videos of lecture material about the subjects that are broken down into 10 min clips followed by labs to learn with your hands.
My Study Guide is just that. More details about the exam broken down by the subjects I experienced.
Did you end up passing the CKS? What was your experience like?