CKAD Exam

ckad-learning.md

Official Exam Links & Resources

• Main certification landing page
• Handbook
• Importannt Tips
• CKAD FAQ

The Exam Itself

• CNCF Training Portal
• System Checker

Curriculum

• v1.15 Aug 2019 PDF
• v1.15 Contents

Resources I Used

• Exercises. This was 95% of the learning I did. DO ALL OF THESE. MORE THAN ONCE
  Once you can do these (without looking up the answer), you are ready
  https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises/
• Very good Medium post
  https://medium.com/@nassim.kebbani/how-to-beat-kubernetes-ckad-certification-c84bff8d61b1
• Also good Medium post
  https://medium.com/bb-tutorials-and-thoughts/how-to-pass-the-certified-kubernetes-application-developer-ckad-exam-503e9562d022
• This post explains the web terminal you will use and has other tips
  https://codeburst.io/the-ckad-browser-terminal-10fab2e8122e
• MS Premier person's post, some more insight
  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/premier-developer/certified-kubernetes-application-developer-ckad-exam-tips/

Themes & Things To Revise & Focus On

• ConfigMaps & mounting into containers as volumes
• More ConfigMaps, seriously it was on about three or four questions, practice all the ways of creating & using a ConfigMap DOCS LINK
• Learn to use every variation of kubectl run and use with or without the --dry-run -o yaml flags, e.g.
  • --restart=Never will create a Pod
  • --restart=Always and --replicas will create a Deployment
  • --restart=OnFailure will create a Job
  • --restart=OnFailure and --schedule will create a CronJob
  • Pass any commands for the pod/container to run at the end of the command after --
    e.g. kubectl run webpod --image nginx --restart Never -- sleep 600
• Memorise the volumeMount and volumes syntax of pod & container spec, you don't have time to look it up, and it comes up a lot
• Multi container pods, experiment with deploying this, and sharing a volume using emptyDir
• Network Policy, podSelectors both for ingress/egress rules and applying the policy
• PV and PVC, go through creating both and a pod to use the PVC, DOCS LINK
  • Surprise! one question required SSH onto a node to create a file for PV of hostPath type
• Ingresses are not in the exam, nor are CRDs, Helm, etc, only core, non-beta API objects
• Editing objects directly with kubectl edit ... only do this if you're confident of the change you're making, i.e. It's something mutable and you know the syntax
  • If you save and it's wrong you're thrown back into the editor. If you're anything less than 99% sure, then export the YAML kubectl get foobar -o yaml --export > blah.yaml and edit that
  • Often the change you are making requires you to delete the object (as it's an immutable field) so kubectl edit is never going to work

Bash/Terminal Tips

Enable kubectl auto complete, very useful and part of the docs so you can copy & paste it
https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/#kubectl-autocomplete

Aliases. Shortening kubectl to k is a HUGE time saver! I used kn as a way to change namespaces

alias k=kubectl
alias kn='kubectl config set-context --current --namespace '

Change editor used by kubectl edit

export KUBE_EDITOR=nano

If a command like delete is taking a while, hit ctrl+z to put it to the background and carry on working

For me when I tried to do SSH , i went inside though ...kubectl get all ..none of command worked

got The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

Any way to solve this

what I understand is that we need to ssh to the worker node to create the host path dir and/or file then exit back to the master node with the correct context to continue with creating the PV, PVC and pod/deploy, am I right ?

@ahmedabuhamid yes, that's my memory of it, but it's been a while since I took the exam