CERTIFICATION

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) program provides assurance that CKAs have the skills, knowledge, and competency to perform the responsibilities of Kubernetes administrators.

Not sure where to start? You may consider reviewing our suggested CKA learning path.

EXAM SIMULATOR! Learners will now have access to an exam simulator, provided by Killer.sh, to experience the exam environment. You will have two exam simulation attempts (36 hours of access for each attempt from the start of activation). Simulation includes 20-25 questions (which are exactly the same for every attempt and every user (unlike those found on the actual exams) and graded simulation results.

UPCOMING POLICY CHANGE: Please note that our Certification Period Policy is changing effective April 01, 2024, 00:00UTC. Certifications achieved on or after this date will expire 24 months from the date the program certification requirements, including passing the exam, are met. We encourage anyone interested and prepared to schedule and take your exam before the policy change. Please see additional details here.

Who Is It For

This certification is for Kubernetes administrators, cloud administrators and other IT professionals who manage Kubernetes instances.
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About This Certification

CKA was created by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a part of their ongoing effort to help develop the Kubernetes ecosystem. The exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple tasks from a command line running Kubernetes.
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What It Demonstrates

A certified K8s administrator has demonstrated the ability to do basic installation as well as configuring and managing production-grade Kubernetes clusters. They will have an understanding of key concepts such as Kubernetes networking, storage, security, maintenance, logging and monitoring, application lifecycle, troubleshooting, API object primitives and the ability to establish basic use-cases for end users.
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Domains & Competencies
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Storage10%
Understand storage classes, persistent volumes
Understand volume mode, access modes and reclaim policies for volumes
Understand persistent volume claims primitive
Know how to configure applications with persistent storage
Troubleshooting30%
Evaluate cluster and node logging
Understand how to monitor applications
Manage container stdout & stderr logs
Troubleshoot application failure
Troubleshoot cluster component failure
Troubleshoot networking
Workloads & Scheduling15%
Understand deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks
Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications
Know how to scale applications
Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments
Understand how resource limits can affect Pod scheduling
Awareness of manifest management and common templating tools
Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration25%
Manage role based access control (RBAC)
Use Kubeadm to install a basic cluster
Manage a highly-available Kubernetes cluster
Provision underlying infrastructure to deploy a Kubernetes cluster
Perform a version upgrade on a Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm
Implement etcd backup and restore
Services & Networking20%
Understand host networking configuration on the cluster nodes
Understand connectivity between Pods
Understand ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources
Know how to configure and use CoreDNS
Choose an appropriate container network interface plugin

Exam Details & Resources
This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple tasks from a command line running Kubernetes.

Candidates have 2 hours to complete the tasks.

Candidates who register for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam will have 2 attempts (per exam registration) to an exam simulator, provided by Killer.sh.  

The exam is based on Kubernetes v1.29
The CKA exam environment will be aligned with the most recent K8s minor version within approximately 4 to 8 weeks of the K8s release date

Prerequisites
There are no pre-requisites for this exam.
Reviews
Jul 2022
The hands-on experience of this test showcases a candidate's skills better than any other certification I have gone through. Instead of memorizing hundreds of settings or gotchas, it focuses on the ability to get to the implementation of a solution. I wish all certifications were done in this way.
Jul 2022
It covered the fundamentals of Kubernetes well. I definitely feel more confident with Kubernetes, and I think that the active way of examining these skills is 100% the correct way to go about this exam. If the aforementioned comments are perceived to make the exam harder, I would happily accept and sign up for an Advanced Kubernetes Ecosystem exam immediately.
Apr 2022
I liked the fact that all important commands to be entered before starting a question are highlighted appropriately. Additionally, there was a copy button for each highlighted word/command to easily copy into terminal, this makes the life of examinees very easy. Thank you!