After weeks of preparing, I finally passed the CKAD exam. CKAD consists of 16-20 hands-on tasks. I’ve read that time management is the most important thing on this exam. I have to agree with that.
How did I prepare?
Firstly, I started with Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) by Mumshad Mannambeth on Udemy. There I realized how K8s works in general. Later I read “The Kubernetes Book” by Nigel Poulton to keep an eye on the details. In the meantime I started to set up my own Talos Linux K8s cluster, and experimented there, but this is a story for a separate post. Eventually, I ended up with “Ultimate Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Mock Exam Series” on KodeKloud and I put effort into doing hands-on labs. I wasn’t aware it wasn’t my final boss yet. I did every KodeKloud mock exam twice. My scores were high enough so I was happy. It was time to book my exam. It would be in two weeks. More than enough. Only after that I remembered that I still had two attempts on killer.sh. I started doing my first attempt. My surprise was huge. Tasks were much harder than KodeKloud ones. Or maybe not harder at all, but more time-consuming. I had to pay attention to more details in one task. When I was doing KodeKloud mock exams, I always had some time left (about 20-30 minutes, depending on the test). Killer.sh was different. I had 10 minutes left and still hadn’t resolved every task. I felt like I was struggling. I didn’t pass my first attempt. And after that I realized what I had written earlier was right - time management. Of course, I’ve heard that the real exam is a little easier than killer.sh. But it didn’t convince me. I decided not to study more, and instead decided to manage my time better. I spent the next two weeks doing my regular things, and then…
The day before the exam
I ran killer.sh again. I expected what I would find there. I didn’t do every task in order. Firstly I did the easiest ones, later I moved to harder ones. And this was a good strategy. I passed that mock exam 10 minutes before the end. I achieved a high result (99/113 points) so I felt ready to go live.
Exam day
I didn’t stress at all about the exam content. I did stress about my environment for the exam. The exam could be taken only online, in your own place, but the environment should be well-prepared. No bargains, nobody in the room, no noise, etc. I prepared one room very well. I kicked everyone out of the house, including the dog. My pre-exam check went smoothly. Of course, I carefully read the whole instructions before the exam day, and later I followed the proctor’s instructions exactly. And my exam started… And that was when I started to worry. (It’s worth mentioning that at exactly that time my neighbor decided to cut the grass with a very noisy mower, and I was afraid my proctor could hear that :D) The first question was very time-consuming. I spent about 12 minutes doing it. I knew that I should start with the easiest, but I wondered if there would be any. So I ended up doing this first task, which had a lot of Deployment stuff to do. There was a notification that I couldn’t delete and recreate the Deployment to pass this task. Luckily just before the exam I repeated how to edit a deployment on the fly. But ok, I did it, and moved to the next. The next questions were a little easier. After 10 (of 16) questions I decided to start skipping the hardest ones, and I would come back if I had enough time. I went through every question, skipped 3, and still had about 30 minutes. That was fair enough. I could take a breath and continue. I did every task I skipped, and still had 10 minutes. I started to check the most difficult tasks. And it was a good idea, because I found some mistakes, and incomplete tasks there. When I finished I had 3 minutes till the end of the exam.
Conclusions
The results are available 24 hours after you finish your attempt. That was the longest 24 hours in my life :) But eventually, I passed with 90%, where the score needed is 66%.
The most important things to remember:
- Learn K8s commands well, especially how to generate YAML using imperative commands. There is not enough time to write YAML from scratch!
- Learn how to effectively use K8s documentation, since it is allowed on the exam. It helps a lot with small tuning, which is impossible to remember.
- Flag and skip a question if it seems difficult, and do the easiest first. As far as I know, it’s common for the first question to be the hardest one, so watch out for that trick :)
- Prepare your environment well.
- Good luck and have fun :)