CKA Exam Tips

cka-tips.md

CKA Exam Tips

Exam taken Sept. 2020

Environment

• The test environment is in Google Chrome, in a split window layout. The left side of the screen shows the question and controls; The right side, a terminal tab and instructions tab
• You can have only one other tab open and are allowed access to Kubernetes docs and blog only
• You'll probably want a decent sized monitor and you're able to use a secondary monitor

Resources

Helpful resources:

• CKA-practice-exercises
• kubectl Cheat Sheet

Editing

You will need to modify YAML quite a bit, set up your editor for it.

.vimrc

• autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ts=2 sts=2 sw=2 expandtab number
• I memoried these settings and set them at the start of the exam in $HOME/.vimrc

tmux

• In the exam, you will work with different clusters and the question tells you what cluster to use. I used tmux tabs for each cluster
• I vertical split my terminal window with my prompt on the left and vim open on the right

kubectl

• You can set aliases like export kgp='kubectl get pods'
• I recommend modifiying the shell config instead of exporting them since you might lose your terminal window

Generating YAML

• Don't write manifests by hand, use kubectl to generate it

• kubectl run pod nginx --image nginx:latest --port 8100 -o yaml --dry-run

    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Pod
    metadata:
    creationTimestamp: null
    labels:
        run: pod
    name: pod
    spec:
    containers:
    - args:
        - nginx
        image: nginx:latest
        name: pod
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8100
        resources: {}
    dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
    restartPolicy: Always
    status: {}

• kubectl create deployment web --image nginx:latest -o yaml --dry-run

  apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  labels:
      app: web
  name: web
  spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
      matchLabels:
      app: web
  strategy: {}
  template:
      metadata:
      creationTimestamp: null
      labels:
          app: web
      spec:
      containers:
      - image: nginx:latest
          name: nginx
          resources: {}
  status: {}