IMPORTANT EXAM CHANGES COMING JANUARY 15th, 2025 Read more about the CKA exam changes coming January 15th, 2025
A set of exercises to help you prepare for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam
The format of the exam is entirely in a hands-on, command-line environment. You can take the exam at home or in a testing center, and you must complete the exam in 180 minutes. Register for the exam here. The cost is US $395.00.
As of December 2021, over 32,000 people have taken the CKA exam since it's introduction in 2017!
To complete the exercises in this repo and get even more practice with exam-like scenarios in a FREE Kubernetes lab environment, go to killercoda.com
During the exam, you will have access to six different clusters (below) in the following configurations:
| Cluster | Members | CNI | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| k8s | 1 master, 2 worker | flannel | k8s cluster |
| hk8s | 1 master, 2 worker | calico | k8s cluster |
| bk8s | 1 master, 1 worker | flannel | k8s cluster |
| wk8s | 1 master, 2 worker | flannel | k8s cluster |
| ek8s | 1 master, 2 worker | flannel | k8s cluster |
| ik8s | 1 master, 1 base node | loopback | k8s cluster - missing worker node |
Important Instructions - Official Exam Handbook
FAQ: CKA - Official Exam Handbook
Also during the exam, you may have one and ONLY one of the following tabs open at all times:
kubernetes.io/docs
kubernetes.io/blog
Not sure if you have the right equipment to take the exam at home? Run a system check
- Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration - 25%
- Workloads & Scheduling - 15%
- Services & Networking - 20%
- Storage - 10%
- Troubleshooting - 30%
View the most current exam curriculum
The CKA exam is graded for outcome only (i.e. end state of the system). The path that a exam taker may have taken to get to the outcome is not evaluated, meaning an exam taker can take any path they want as long as it achieves the correct outcome. Incomplete work, i.e. work that is input but did not lead to the correct outcome, will not be evaluated.
Some exam items may have multiple parts and therefore have multiple 'checks' (one for each verifiable component of the answer). Candidates will be given credit for each successful check, so partial credit is possible on such items.
Exam items are also setup to be independent of one another. As long as the candidate does exactly what the questions ask, there will be no dependencies or conflicts, and as long as the candidate correctly achieves the outcome being asked for in the specific exam item, they would earn points for that particular exam item.
Scoring is done using an automatic grading script. The grading scripts have been time tested and continuously refined, so the likelihood of having incorrectly graded a question or two is very low since we grade on outcomes (end state of the system), not the path the user took to get there.
The CKA exam is currently on v1.31 of k8s. The removal of dockershim happend in v1.24, so expect the containerd container runtime if you are taking the exam today and into the future. You can view the container runtime in use with the command k get no -o wide. The output will look similar to this (see the column named "CONTAINER-RUNTIME"):
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION INTERNAL-IP EXTERNAL-IP OS-IMAGE KERNEL-VERSION CONTAINER-RUNTIME
controlplane Ready control-plane 34d v1.28.1 172.30.1.2 <none> Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS 5.4.0-131-generic containerd://1.6.12
node01 Ready <none> 34d v1.28.1 172.30.2.2 <none> Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS 5.4.0-131-generic containerd://1.6.12The exams are upgraded to the latest version of k8s within 4-6 weeks of the version being released. Dockershim FAQ