Step 3: Practice exam problems — of 5 Steps to pass your Kubernetes exam
This is part #3 of the 5 Steps to pass your Kubernetes exam miniseries. In case you missed other parts, here are all the posts:
- Decide if you want to become Kubernetes certified.
- Learn Kubernetes.
- Practice exam problems.
- Master the exam environment.
- Day of the exam.
Today, we are going to cover practicing exam problems.
By now, you should already have the body of knowledge about Kubernetes needed to pass the exam. But knowledge is not enough for CKAD, CKA, or CKS. You only get about 6 minutes per problem. If you want to have another pass to validate answers it’s more like 4 or 5 minutes per task. You need to develop muscle memory in the emulator using problems that you can encounter during the exam. You find plenty of problem sets for the exams. We have chosen the ones that worked best for our users:
CKAD
https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises
https://codeburst.io/kubernetes-ckad-weekly-challenges-overview-and-tips-7282b36a2681
CKA
https://github.com/alijahnas/CKA-practice-exercises
https://dev.to/subodev/50-questions-for-ckad-and-cka-exam-3bjm
CKS
https://itnext.io/cks-exam-series-1-create-cluster-security-best-practices-50e35aaa67ae
What’s important is that you practice using the setup you intend to use in the real exam: aliases, tmux / no tmux, text editor, and its settings. You want to tune your settings to minimize keystrokes. We have curated the most commonly used settings in the following script http://sh.kubewiz.com/core. Unfortunately, The Linux Foundation doesn’t allow executing scripts during the exam if the scripts are not hosted on kubernetes.io. Our customers memorize the options that they find valuable and set up their shells manually at the beginning of their exam.
One other thing that you want to remember is that you won’t have time to write a lot of yaml. They want you to use --dry-run to generate yaml or copy/paste/modify examples from the official Kubernetes docs.
Note: There are many opinionated posts on the Internet about what setup is the best for the exam. e.g. some people say you must run tmux to pass the exam. The best setup is the one that works best for you. If you are not familiar with tmux shortcuts then it’s probably too much overhead to acquire muscle memory for tmux just for the exam.
Summary
In this post, we have covered how to practice Kubernetes exam tasks. Speed is the name of the game. The goal is to gain muscle memory to reduce the time needed to solve exam tasks.
Coming up is Step #4 — Master the exam environment.
About Kubewiz
https://kubewiz.com/ offers realistic practice exams for CKAD, CKA, CKS (coming soon).
