You might have heard about some of the upcoming changes for the CKAD exam objectives as announced by the Linux Foundation recently. These changes will go into effect on September 28: If you sit for the exam on the 28th of September or after it will be in the new format, irrespective of when you scheduled the exam or on what version your first attempt was (If you made a previous attempt). All exams after the 28th of September will be in the new format.

Learn more about our Kubernetes Certification course.

I wanted to write to you to let you know what we are doing about it and what you should be doing about it. So read on.

What’s changing in the CKAD objectives?

Below is a summary of changes. The one on the left is the new exam curriculum and the one on the right is the old exam curriculum. I have highlighted the new exam objectives in green boxes. There are a few new concepts to learn such as building container images, blue/green or canary deployments, Helm, understanding API deprecations, discovering and using resources that extend Kubernetes (CRD), and some security concepts such as Authentication, Authorization and Admission Control. We have already covered the security concepts in the CKA course so you should be covered there if you have done CKA already. We will be adding these to the CKAD course soon.

What are we doing to our CKAD Course?

We will be updating our CKAD Preparation course with the additional contents within the next week or two. You will see a new section at the end of the course named “Updates for Sep 2021 Changes” (This is not added at this point in time. It will be added in a week or so). We will add new topics to this section as and when we produce them.

After September 28th we will re-organize the course structure to match the exam curriculum.

What should you do about preparing for the CKAD Certification?

You have two options (obviously):

1. Give your best! Prepare and attempt the exam before the 28th of September.
2. If this is not sufficient time for you to prepare and you don’t think you can make it before the 28th, continue to prepare with the current contents. All existing contents are still part of the exam objectives. About 80% of the contents will remain the same. You may learn the new contents as and when we add them to the course.

We wish you all the best!

Here is some inspiration!