Cleared CKAD today on my second attempt with 85%, just wanted to share my expe . . .

Madhan Kumar:
Cleared CKAD today on my second attempt with 85%, just wanted to share my experience nd learning . Failed my first attempt couple of days back , got 65% (questions were not tough, but I ran out of time as I worked on the questions in the same order from 1 to 19 and I could attempt only 12 questions property and never used any custom aliases nd used bookmarks I found online ) . Retook the exam yesterday and only additional prep that I did in the last couple of days was to create my own bookmarks for all the scenarios that I can think of , and create my own aliases and functions based on my experience, also did the killer.sh mock tests out of curiosity, but I don’t think it is worth what you are paying for 30$ for 2 mock tests seems excessive, but the quality of questions in killer.sh and the explanations of answers and tips given in answers are definitely of good quality I did not learn anything new from it that did not from the Udemy course . and *skipped large questions with less weightage towards the last of the exam * .
Resources that helped me are below:

  1. Udemy CKAD course, Lightning Labs , Mock tests and the Game of Pods by Mumshad & team.
  2. Be good with VIM or nano editor . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knyJt8d6C_8
  3. GitHub exercises which everyone seems to recommend https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises
  4. Retook the udemy Lightning labs and Mock tests until I could clear each of them within 30 mins . As speed is the key to passing this exam . A special thanks to @Mumshad Mannambeth for giving unlimited attempts for the lightning labs and mock tests and game of pods which is something than really helps . As cloud resources are not cheap ! .
  5. killer.sh mock tests , take it if you have the money to spend , else just skip it , you can easily get more than 90% just by using Mumshad’s udemy course and with some of your own prep and SPEED.
  6. Bookmarks and Aliases are your friend use them , but not too much , below are the only ones that I used , I put them in my own .ckadrc file so that I can source them again just in case my terminal disconnects which has happened during my first attempt , as I accidently typed exit from the terminal instead of from within ssh and it took 4 mins to log me back in and another 4 minutes to retype my aliases which can be avoided and time can be saved if you can put your aliases nd variables in your own rc file , I did not want to mess with the default .bashrc or -bash_profile so went with this approach instead .
$ cat ~/.ckadrc
source &lt;(kubectl completion bash)  # copy/paste from ckad cheatsheet <https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/>
alias k=kubectl                    # copy/paste from ckad cheatsheet <https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/>
complete -F __start_kubectl k      # copy/paste from ckad cheatsheet <https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/>
alias sns="kubectl config set-context --current --namespace "
export do="--dry-run=client -o yaml"
alias kgp="kubectl get pods -o wide"
alias kaf="kubectl apply -f"
krf() { kubectl replace -f $1 --force; }
kexp() { kubectl explain $1 --recursive | less; }
alias apod="kubectl run apod --image=nginx:alpine --rm -it -- sh"
$
$ cat ~/.vimrc
set ts=2	
set sw=2
set nu
set expandtab

Mumshad Mannambeth:
Great job! Congratulations!!!

Kasper Siig:
Great insights, and congrats!