Varun Gopal:
Happy to share with the community that I cleared the CKA examination and entered to the k8s world officially last Sunday. Thought of sharing the learning experience in my k8s journey to achieve this, which may help others in this community too.
For me no prior experience in k8s and any cncf certifications. Started the k8s journey to upgrade my skills and plans for a career change to Devops world.
My prior experience is in to Linux System Administration near to 12.6 years, along with knowledge in tools like Ansible,puppet,git,cfengine and Azure cloud. I started my learning journey with Redhat Openshift actually and pursued Redhat specializations in Openshift administration (EX280 & EX180 Certified) before I reached here and started learning.
Training & Study Materials
Started with purchasing Udemy Courses by @Mumshad Mannambeth Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners - Hands-on & Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests.
4 Months Learning, started on June 2022.
Near to 4 times, watched both the tutorials. More in to video than PDF version I followed these timeframe.
Labs did multiple times. I am sure I practiced minimum 50 times all labs from all modules.
Exam Preparation
Started with Lightning & Mock Labs from kodekloud. 2 to 3 weeks I continuously practiced it daily and gained some confidence before exam schedule.
But still I was not confident to book the exam. I got a chance to attend a live workshop at my work place last Monday and I was able to complete the task on workshop successfully. That gave me some confidence and made me to book the examination on Sunday 1:30 AM IST.
Activated the Killer shell on Friday afternoon and did my my first test. I know it was late, but there was no option infront of me other than that due to my routine work schedules. Results on the first session was disappointed for me and I got 33/125, but I was not in the mind set to reschedule the exam. I prepared again little bit based on the scenarios, without checking the solution and activated another killer session 12 hours before the exam. Got an improvement 75/125. Still I was not satisfied, but there was no choice for me, as reschedule was not possible at that time.
Exam Schedule
Actively following all the posts in this channel and saw many posts regarding exam schedule selection. Hence I also preferred a low traffic timeframe. When I checked in the portal to schedule exam on last Monday, only 2 days was available Saturday & Sunday actually. Timings are like anytime between 10PM to 6AM like that. But I don’t remember correctly. I scheduled for 1:30 AM. Not faced any difficulties or challenges in scheduling part.
Exam Day
1)system requirements I used to take the exam
Took Exam in my Personal Laptop.
Configuration: MacBook Pro, Apple M1 Pro with 16 GB & running with Monterey Version 12.6
No External Camera,Monitor,Microphone,KeyBoard & mouse I used on exam. So it is pretty sure we can write the exam without these stuffs from my experience and good laptop( with a good internet) is enough. FYI if someone looking for this info.
Used a Fibre broadband wireless connection for my exam. Checked the speed just 1 Minute before I entered to the exam and it was 87.0 Mbps download & 62.7 Mbps upload. It’s enough for completing the exam without any delay if there is no internet distribution from the vendor. Also try to keep a backup in case needed. I kept a Wifi Dongle, but not that much speed compared to the Broadband. By God’s grace no interruption happened. That’s my experience on Internet connection part.
2)Onboarding for Exam.
After saw many comments in many communities and Linkedin, entered exam with a little fear and anxiety. But in my case it was very smooth and no difficulties I faced. I had experience in taking Redhat exams prior, may be that’s the reason I am feeling like that I believe. This may vary and it’s my experience only.
Exam was scheduled on Sunday 1:30 AM IST and the option “Take Exam” was active 30 minutes before, as they promised over the Exam confirmation email. In next 10 minutes I completed the onboarding steps like installation of PSI browser, showing my ID verification, Camera & Microphone checks. They started the verification from 1:15AM and it last to 15 to 20 Minutes max if I remember correctly. It was okay and no difficulties I faced and as I said I appeared for Redhat online exam prior, there they followed the same process only, like Verification for ID checks and Testing environment. Around 1:38AM they released the exam and in between exam there was no chat communication happened in between me and proctor, as I didn’t face any issues in between the exam. Environment kicked out from me from the window, when the scheduled time over for me.
3)Exam environment
Killer shell and exam environment is almost similar, that’s what I felt. Like copy paste options, firefox, terminal etc usage are same like killer environment. I didn’t feel any lag or slowness in executing commands or moving from terminal to firefox and viceversa. So practice in killer shell is an advantage to get familiar with exam environment.
4)Exam Experience
Can’t reveal questions due to NDA and hope you can understand that limitation and thanks for the understanding. I can say, it is not tough like Killer scenarios, but not easy as well like Kodekloud Mock & lightening labs. You can easily nail it with good marks if you are are able to handle/practice both killer and kodekloud exams prior to the real exam. For me I scored 72/100 in real exam. I believe I can score more than that, if I practiced bit more in Killer before attending the exam. I was in rush to take the exam unnecessarily for no reason 
. Along with that suggesting to check and familiarize with the k8s official documentation more, it will be a advantage how more you are familiar with the official documentation and practicing the scenarios in it instead of following the course and killer shell only. That is the main takeaway I felt after completing the exams and seeing from my results. Moreover official documentation itself is the backbone for K8S with respective for scoring more marks in exam as well as in case of real life scenarios when working in a production environment.
Finally Received results received via email in 24 hours as promised. In a nutshell, all went smooth for my learning journey in CKA and with KodeKloud community. Hope the experience shared is helpful for all in this community. Thanks All!!!
Thanks to @Mumshad Mannambeth for helping in this learning journey and for the well articulated course. Also thanks @unnivkn @Alistair Mackay @Trung Tran @Tej Singh Rana for continuous support providing in this community. Keep going!!
https://www.credly.com/earner/earned/badge/943ef374-67b3-4faa-a52c-5d98ff2d939c
and thanks for sharing your experience.