how did I pass the CKA exam

Description

I took the CKA exam and got the score of 97 out of 100.

The exam is 2 hours and I finished the exam by just 1 hour.

In this article, I will describe how to prepare and pass the exam based on my experience.

First of all

Read all articles about how to prepare and pass the exam on the Internet, I spent 2~3 hours for that and took notes. Believe me it will give you a general idea of how to proceed at the very beginning.

The most important things for preparing for the exam

  1. Take acloudguru CKA course

The most helpful thing for me is taking the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) course on the https://acloudguru.com/.

The material is very good, it covers everything the exam requires, it gives you real environment for operating and simulate what you do in the exam. After taking the course, you will have a very good understanding of all concepts.

  1. Be familiar with official website

I read all kubernetes official website documentations. You don’t need to remember, there are too many details. The cka exam does not require you remembering everything. But you should know the basic concepts. It is also a good opportunity of learning rather than justing passing the exam. Also if you cannot find something on the official website, it won’t appear on the exam.

  1. Do exercises as much as possible

Find a real k8s environment and do exercises. I use the environment in acloudguru which I feel very convenient.

Try to search on the Internet to find all CKA related questions, and do it in a real k8s environment. I entered the kubectl command hundreds of times and it is definitely helpful for passing the exam.

  1. killer.sh is very good

After registering the exam, you will be given two opportunities to use killer.sh, it is very nice. It simulates the real exams, and you can be familiar with the real exam environments. The only different thing is that killer.sh environment’s Internet connection is much worse(latency is high) than the real exam environment. The questions on the killer.sh is much more difficult than the real exam, but I still got 100+ score on the killer.sh, believe me that solving each problem in the killer.sh is helpful.

What is not that helpful

  1. Many people said https://www.katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes is helpful, but I found its k8s version is very old, and the operations are different from the current version used in the exam. So I did not use it.

  2. Also many people said https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way is helpful, I took a glance at it by 15 minutes and did not feel it is very helpful for the exam. It might be a little helpful for learning though.

  3. Many people talked about creating bookmarks about the official website pages, and open the bookmarks during the exams. I also created many bookmarks but it does not help during the exam. Instead, I feel it is very easy and straightforward to use the official website’s search box during the exam.