Folks - happy to confirm I cleared my CKA certification. Big thanks to @Mumshad . . .

Lakshminarayanan Krishnan:
Folks - happy to confirm I cleared my CKA certification. Big thanks to @Mumshad Mannambeth and @Vijin Palazhi for the courses and hands-on labs and Game-of-Pods. Some suggestions and observations from my perspective on taking the exam:

  1. Practice, Practice, Practice. You MUST be comfortable with kubectl imperative commands so you can quickly generate YAML files on the fly to then work on them to edit it.
  2. I didn’t have to use multiple aliases beyond alias c=clear and alias kc=kubectl. And of course, bash-completion is such a time-saver, and must have.
  3. Am sure you are already aware, current curriculum has you being tested for 17 questions, 2 hours, with a pass mark of 66 (if I’m not mistaken). 2 hours flies by in a jiffy, so time-allocation is very important
  4. When the proctor releases the exam session, spend a few minutes running through ALL questions first - make mental notes of which questions are of larger time-investment, and which ones are small low-hanging fruit to breeze through. One of questions I was passing through was so easy I finished it then-and-there while doing the run-through.
  5. On the point of skimming through the questions, if you start working on one of the questions which you think is very easy, but when you start working on it, notice it is gonna take more time, LEAVE it. Don’t obsess over it. Flag it to be attended to later (there’s a button on the bottom left that you can click to “flag for later”).
  6. Same story with the other questions - skim through them, get a mental picture of which ones you can crank out first quickly, and finish them.
  7. Start cranking out the questions in order of ease -> complexity.
  8. Be very aware of the context you are advised to switch to. Best would be, when you select a question, blindly first copy paste the context-switch command they provide you and execute it on your terminal
  9. I was allowed to have multiple monitors/desktops, and a chrome window in each monitor. Proctor definitely keeps track of applications you are running in the background, but multiple monitors / desktops are allowed, as long as you share all desktops with the proctors
  10. Keep calm and try to not lose your cool, which can happen very easily (it happened to me 2 times, and I lost about 10 minutes due to my web-interface becoming unresponsive and me having to reset my console which reset all flags I had placed earlier).
  11. When referring to k8s website documentation, be on the lookout for articles that are under the /tasks/ space over those under /docs/. The ones under tasks usually have full working templates, rather than the more theoretical stuff under /docs/

PP:
Congratulations @Lakshminarayanan Krishnan

ku yo:
do we have context-switch different for all 17 questions ? like each question have its own context-switch ?

ku yo:
and do you need to go to ssh to worker node(is that kind of question also there) ?

Lakshminarayanan Krishnan:
for questions where it is required, there will be a mention of “use this context”

Lakshminarayanan Krishnan:
for troubleshooting questions, you will need to ssh to approproaiate node to perform your troubleshooting

ku yo:
ok, thanks for info

Roshan Ranasinghe:
Congratulations… @Lakshminarayanan Krishnan … I have couple of questions

  1. Does it support auto complete without any issue?
  2. For ETCD backup do we need to go to master/controlplane node or we can do it sitting in the student-node itself ?

Lakshminarayanan Krishnan:
Yep - autocomplete worked without any issues

Lakshminarayanan Krishnan:
etcd backup - learn to do from both controlplane and worker node. different ppl are asked to do it differently

Roshan Ranasinghe:
ok …Was there any permission issue accessing like folders , files etc ?

Lakshminarayanan Krishnan:
nope… every question will have you at the exact specific permissions that are required for the question asked to be performed

Roshan Ranasinghe:
ok …thanks again

Tej_Singh_Rana:
Hello, @ku yo
Please watch the CKA demo, https://youtu.be/ZByl-a-eghc?t=513

Tej_Singh_Rana:
Congratulations @Lakshminarayanan Krishnan :hugging_face:

ku yo:
@Tej_Singh_Rana: I found this line Rebooting of your server IS permitted at any time. in https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/tips-cka-and-ckad#exam-technical-instructions|exam-technical-instructions what does it mean ?

ku yo:
does that mean rebooting internet router ? if internet connection down?

Tej_Singh_Rana:
I think it’s talking about rebooting the exam server? In case, if it gets stuck or hang.

Mohamed Ayman:
Congratulations! Thanks for sharing your experience and tips!