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:
- 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. - I didn’t have to use multiple aliases beyond
alias c=clear
andalias kc=kubectl
. And of course, bash-completion is such a time-saver, and must have. - 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
- 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.
- 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”).
- 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.
- Start cranking out the questions in order of ease -> complexity.
- 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
- 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
- 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).
- 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/