Passing the CKAD: My Experience and Study Tips

I passed the CKAD exam on September 12, 2022, and now it’s time to share my experience with the exam.

Exam Preparation

I referred Mumshad Mannambeth’s CKAD course for preparation. This course has almost all the resources required for exam preparation. I took around four weeks to complete this course.

https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-application-developer/

Practice Question

As I said, the course is good enough for preparation, but I recommend more practice resources.

• CKAD Exercises by Dimitris-Ilias Gkanatsios: https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises

• Killercoda’s CKAD scenarios: https://killercoda.com/killer-shell-ckad

During practice, keep Kubernetes documentation for reference. It will help you understand the official documentation and save time during the exam.

CKAD exam comes with two free attempts (each of 36 hours) of the killer.sh Exam Simulator.

https://killercoda.com/killer-shell-ckad

Try utilizing both attempts, and start your attempts during the weekend so you can use the full 36 hours. killer.sh is too tricky compared to the actual exam, so don’t get demotivated if you cannot finish the practice questions in the given time.

The Exam

Linux Foundation introduced some new rules in June 2022

• Only one monitor is allowed for the exam

• Bookmarks are not allowed

• The exam is now carried out in a remote Linux VM

The new remote VM exam is terrible. Expect some leg during the exam even if you have a good internet connection.

Please go through the official handbook and Instructions before the exam

• https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/lf-handbook2/

• https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/tips-cka-and-ckad

If you regularly use many aliases, add and use them. The point is don’t waste too much time memorizing the aliases. In my opinion, you need one alias i.e. alias k=kubeclt The exam will have 15-16 questions, and you will have 7-8 minutes for each question. Time management is critical in this exam. Do read the questions carefully before jumping on them. Finish all the easy questions first. Also, don’t waste time on questions that are doable but will take time. You can attempt such questions once you after finishing all the easy questions.

I also wrote a series of blogs for CKAD Preparation. You can find them here:

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes - Pods, Deployments, ReplicaSets and Namespaces- Part 1

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes -Inject Data Into Applications- Part 2

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes - Pod Configuration, Multi-Container Pods and Init Containers - Part 3

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes - Readiness Probes, Liveness Probe and Logging - Part 4

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes - Labels, Selectors & Annotations, Jobs and CronJobs - Part 5

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes - Kubernetes Services and Ingress - Part 6

• CKAD exam Preparation Notes - Storage in Kubernetes - Part 7

That’s all from my side for the CKAD exam preparation. I wish you all the best for your exam.

You can contact me on Twitter or LinkedIn for any doubts about the exam.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateekjaindev/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PrateekJainDev