How I Failed the CKA Exam

I bought the Certified Kubernetes Admin (CKA) exam a little over a year ago with the Linux Foundation’s Cyber Monday deal. I was a junior engineer at the time with basically zero experience with K8s, other than knowing about it and having worked with my team’s AWS EKS cluster. But I wanted to learn!

Unfortunately, I did not have much time to learn. Our MLOps team transitioned into a new organization last year, which came with a whole bunch of new tools, systems, and practices to learn (none of which involved working with K8s). Alongside this, I had a few life changes and responsibilities that prevented me from studying up on K8s in my free time.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation offers certifications that allow users to demonstrate their competence in a hands-on, command-line environment. The purpose of the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam is to provide an assurance that individuals have the skills, knowledge, and competency to perform the responsibilities of Kubernetes administrators. It is an online, proctored, performance-based test that requires solving multiple issues from a command line.

Quick facts on the CKA:

• An exam voucher can be purchased here, costing ~$400, but can be purchased periodically throughout the year at discounted prices. 

• The exam works through a PSI secure browser and gives you a remote desktop sandbox to complete 17 tasks.

• Task difficulties range from easy to hard.

• You need a score of at least 66% to pass the exam

Overall, give yourself ample time to study/practice before taking the exam. You'll need this if you don’t work with K8s on a regular basis and/or have years of experience.

Despite having not prepared, I had to eventually schedule my exam before my voucher would expire — You have 12 months from the date of your purchase to take your exam. I scheduled my exam two months ago and did my best to learn and practice over a weekend that I had available, fully expecting to fail the exam but still wanting to learn and give it a shot. Though I didn't pass this time, I hope to take the exam again sometime in the future once I feel more prepared.

Some lessons learned:

• Don’t wait to schedule your exam at the last possible moment. You are offered a retake with your exam purchase. Schedule your initial exam intentionally with some weeks left for you to reschedule a follow-up exam in case you fail and need to study/practice some more. Otherwise you'll end up like me with no time left to take advantage of the retake (see retake policy).

• You are offered two practice exams with your purchase. Use them!

• Get hands-on experience as fast as possible, if you don't already work with K8s. This is your best chance to retain your learning and prepare for the exam, which is 17 hands-on tasks. I personally spent way too much time watching/listening to videos which ultimately was not helpful. Hands-on experience, coupled with curated learning material (see my tips below), will put you well on your way to passing the CKA exam. 

• DO NOT try and create your own bare-metal cluster as a means for studying/preparing for the CKA exam. It's just a huge waste of time compared to the other things you can do to study for the exam, like using killer.sh or kind.

• Make sure you have nothing pressing right after your exam. The online proctoring service, PSI, is absolutely terrible and it can be a nightmare going through the check-in process. My check-in took an hour, which delayed the start of my exam. Thankfully I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be right after my exam so I was able to allow the inconvenience. 

• You are allowed to access the official docs page and blog from kubernetes.io (see here). Be sure to know how to navigate these pages effectively before your exam!

• Time management is the most critical part of the exam. You have two hours to complete 17 tasks, which translates to roughly 7 minutes for each task. Try to move quickly, go through the easiest tasks first (you'll find plenty of them), and return to the more difficult tasks once you've finished all of the easy ones.

Along with the lessons learned from failing the exam, I came away with some tips that I want to recommend to my future self for the next time I prepare to take the CKA exam. I hope these tips can help you too!

Tip #1: Get hands-on experience!

• Use kind to practice deploying, maintaining, and using your own K8s clusters locally on your own computer. (I'll post another article later on how to do this)

• Use the CKA Simulator at killer.sh get a feel for the types of tasks given to you during the exam.

• Practice your skills with the kubectl CLI, Vim, YAML and Bash. You can actually purchase additional certifications.

Tip #2: Study curated learning material!

I use Pluralsight to learn tech skills faster and I highly recommend the platform to anyone trying to learn. These are the resources I recommend for preparing to take the CKA exam:

1) Take the Kubernetes Administration Skill IQ assessment to measure your current aptitude and see your skill gaps.

2) Watch Nigel Poulton's courses if you are a total beginner or need a friendly refresher on the basics. 

• Docker and Kubernetes: The Big Picture

• Getting Started with Kubernetes

3) The full CKA learning path. This is fast paced, delivers a bunch of great information, but might be challenging to follow along if you are in a rush or do not have at least a reasonable Linux background.

4) Retake the Kubernetes Administration Skill IQ assessment to see your growth. Follow the remaining skill gap recommendations from here as you continue to prepare for you exam.

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