Early this week, I took the 2nd try of the CKAD exam and passed it. I scored 89% this time despite the situation where I ran out of time and couldn’t finish the last question completely. Now I am CKAD certified!
I had my first try of the exam in Aug last year without many preparations. As CNCF gives you a free 2nd chance if the 1st one is not successful, I wanted to take the 1st exam as an opportunity to test my Kubernetes knowledge, to get familiar with the test environment, and to sense how difficult it is. I scored 64% of the 1st exam which is 2% short of the passing score.
Late last year I was busy on my work and until recently I got some time to properly prepare for and take the exam again. I spent about 2 weeks to polish my skills with kubectl and other tools, and used the resources in the following two github repos heavily.
- https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises – The resources in this repo could help you get familiar with both kubectl commands and Kubernetes resources and configurations.
- https://github.com/bmuschko/ckad-crash-course – The exercises in this repo are in the similar form of the exam questions. And if you like, you can also take the course from O’Reilly.
Here are several my tips regarding the exam which I hope could help those who are preparing for the certificate.
- The only tools that you can use in the exam environment are
kubectl,vimandtmux. So be very familiar with them. - In the exam, you are allowed to open another browser tab to connect to https://kubernetes.io/docs, but you may not have enough time to read the docs in detail. I relied on
kubectl explainmore than checking the docs. - As the exam environment runs in Chrome, a big screen definitely helps.
- Most importantly, a lot of practices. The history showed that I tapped k/kubectl for 1372 times and vim for 429 times in 2 weeks before the exam.