I came here to share my thoughts on this exam. I was preparing for this exam for quite a long time (3 years with slow path) . I have made Udemy mock exams, I have made Ultimate Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Mock Exam and after completing second Killer.sh exam and scoring at 30% - I came to few conclusions:
- despite all the efforts I am still not ready and I see no more options to pump my knowledge higher. Killer.sh exam scenarious just killers and I am afraid Linux Foundation will ask same epic stuff on exam.
- getting CKA certified, without working on it EVERY DAY seems to be impossible and chances are similar to winning in casino
not sure how usage of K8S technology will expand in time, if there are no entry level.
I have bought my voucher for the exam, but It seems I will just let it age and go. I ahve spent much time, money and effort on it, but Linux Foundation decided, that there are too many CKA certified guys barging with the esiness of the exam. I would warn people chasing this certificate to may be spare your time and money.
I also failed to get a higher % in killer.sh exams, but that exams are way more harder than the actual one. In my experience, if you make everyone of the CKA exams in kodekloud well, you could pass the certification very easily. That’s not only my personal opinion, but the many around here.
Just make the CKA exams in kodekloud until you feel that you know it very well, then go for the certification exam.
You bring me hope back. In Killer.sh they claim to have some difficulty level, as actual exam, but each of they question seemed to be as 3-4 question form real exam. Sometimes they were asking soo epic stuff, which is just not conductable without 20 years of experience in writing Linux OS-s or exam timeframe is just too short for it!
Have you done CKA exam? Do mind to share your experience and strategy of preparing for it ?
Yes, I had done it by training here. I just made the CKA exams preparation many times and also the lighting ones[There are some others in the course, I just every kind of exam made it many times]. Then when I learned well each one. I just went to pass the CKA cert in the first intent. I made just one time the killer.sh but I knew because of previous comments here that is difficult. Also back then the same killer.sh page said that the exam is way more harder than the current one. Is just to level you up more if you like, which is pretty nice to be honest. But I didn’t had the time back then and just went directly to the certification exam. What I did also was to read many times the killer.sh answers. I made the effort to understand what was going on.
I really do not mind to be more “leved up” , but when they ask to find kubelet binary hided in 10 directories away and no config filesis pointing to it; or make an APi call to kubernetes API with token from the folder, which was not even existing in my system (tried to find it after reading the answers, but I could not make it at the end anyhow); or filter the data with headers I have never seen before (leads to the killer.sh expectation to have 20+ years of experience of work in Linux administrator position) … it just was not clicking together for me! Kuberentes is like an Universe - big and versative and it has soo many different topics: networks, workloads, linux nodes, RBAC, containers stuff… etc., so actually it is the endless field for crafting epic questions with only purpose to fail candidate in the exam. To me it was creating a sense of going to casino and trying to win jackpot. If anyone from KodeKloud is reading it has a chance to provide feedback to killer.sh guys - tell them, that they are just on the wrong path!
For now I have calmed down and I consider killer.sh questions just like some nonsense. I hope the exam will be with question of the same level as I see it here in teh CKA mock exams. I already feel comfortable with this tasks and may be will attempt exam. I will post my exam experience latter here.
I have failed on CKA exam few weeks ago. I was preparing for exam with Kodekloud Mock Exams and I have also bought 3 exams from Killer Shell and still I have scored only 50%.
Topics I have failed with:
- Install ArgoCD repo in Helm → template it with cleaning CRD’s → install it in cluster.
Unfortunately KodeKloud exam neithr killer shell exam did not have tempalting scenarious. No idea how Linux Foundation expect students to perform this task without +5 hands-on experince on production K8S cluster?!?!?
- Install the CNI → update networking stuff → install it → make sure it is working.
It was a signle node cluster, so simple “run pod --image=redis” commands had no effect due to taints on node and I had no time wriete proper manifest for it. Probably it took a bunch of scores from me.
- Create Getway API config with the reference to the TLS certificate stored in the configmap
There are no code sample for it in official K8S documentation, I knew only the config for using certificate from the secret - bunch of scores went away. After the exam, I found the answer only in kubernetes forums diuscussions. Why asking things missing in official documentation - my eternal and rhetorical question to Linux Foundation (LF).
- List all CRDs with cert-manager in name using ONLY kubectl commands.
LF was expecting me to write script like this:
**kubectl get crd | grep cert-manager | awk '{print $1}' | xarg -I {} kubectl get crd {} > file.yaml**
I am not big professional, but Google told me it is a bash script - once again: neither KodeKloud no Killer Shell ask and teach such an epic shit! Everyone says " You do not have to have scripting skills" … and next moment a question like this pops up on exam!
One year ago LF has made a very wrong turn with this exam in attempt to add some “credibility” to the exam and they end up in the same stupid spot as Cisco and other big vendors do - they exam are not doable without dumps and the are not for the people without hands-on experience. Nice story about Open Source and Open Book Exam policy just do not work here and it is my biggest disappointment!
I am looking at this exam and questions without any enthusiams. Probably I might accept the idea, that my time and money investments into this certification were wasted and I won’t get this paper. Even If I do - there will be no sense of accomplishment, because you just have to dump this exam.