CKAD(Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) — My journey

I am happy and thrilled to have completed CKAD(Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) certification. My intention to take up this certification was purely because i wanted to validate my knowledge against an official certification. It has been a fulfilling journey and great amount of learning throughout.

This exam is timed at 2 hours with 19 hands on questions. 19 questions and 2 hours may sound simplistic and achievable but it is quite challenging. I am outlining the resources that i used below.

I started preparing for this during the month of Oct in 2018 and got certified during 1st week of February 2019. There were quite a few resources that helped me in this journey and i outline them below.

1. Book — Kubernetes In Action — This book gives a thorough understanding of kubectl commands and the various kubernetes API objects. I read this book 2 times and also practiced everything which was illustrated in that book. Personally, it was a fullfilling read and was gratifying to understand how internals like optimistic conurrency work with API server and etcd
2. Online course — Certified Kubernetes Application Developer course by Mumshad Munnambeth . This is an amazing course to get yourself equipped for the certification. Best part of this course is its labs which gives you all the required practice. You can use it to improve your speed with kubectl, which is really critical as outlined below. I am thankful to Mumshad for this course and cannot wait for his CKA course(which is due in Q1 2019)
3. Kubernetes.io documentation — Especially the concepts and tasks sections which illustrate various kubectl commands and the options surrounding them.

Tips

1. I would highly recommend that questions be answered based on their weight-age. All the questions have their weight-age displayed. There are some questions with lower weight-age that will consume more time. So its better to come back to these questions once you are done with questions of higher weight-age.
2. Time and speed are critical. 2 hrs yes, but since the format of the exam is hands on its quite important to keep a check on the time. Get as much as practice as you can.
3. Resist the urge to answer the questions sequentially.
4. The notepad is your friend. For questions that you want to come back later and answer, make a note of it in the notepad provided in the exam to note the question number and its weightage. Doing this will help you to prioritize which questions you want to take a look at.
5. If you are from windows background like me, then get some understanding on volume mounts, ssh, linux file systems
6. Read the instructions given before the start of the exam on how to copy and paste from kubernetes.io documentation into the shell.

Good luck!!