Hi,
I’ve followed KodeKloud CKA and CKAD courses and thanks to them I’ve been able to pass both exams at first try. I’ve learnt through the KodeKloud labs but also by building my own highly available 5 nodes cluster (3 control nodes and 2 worker nodes). Now I’m thinking about subscribing to the premium plan of KodeKloud and I’m wondering if the tools that must be used to master CKS exams are all freely available and if that exam can be mastered also on my own home-lab K8S cluster, since going through the course topics I see mentioning tools that I don’t know.
Thank you in advance for any help!
You should be able to install all of the tool on your local cluster, especially the one you describe. I was even able to install almost all of them on minikube. But you’re right to be focused on the new tools – there are quite a lot of them you’ll need to learn for CKS.
1 Like
Wow, that’s amazing. Maybe a 3+2 cluster is even too much to experiment with CKS and a 1 control + 1 worker cluster is sufficient and easier to maintain for this purpose. I’d like not to “break” the 3+2 cluster I have which is quite useful for experimenting for stuff like CKA.
I really should do a blog post about that 
Although I wouldn’t worry too much about breaking your fancier cluster; doing that in minikube is a bit harder than it needs to be, since minikube does not have a package system, so getting things like falco (an intrusion detection system) is a bit tricky on minikube, but pretty easy on a cluster like yours. But you can do a lot on minikube for CKS practice with a bit of effort.
1 Like
None of the clusters in any of the exams are bigger than 1x control, 2x worker
Note that we have several builds for kubeadm clusters right here
.
1 Like
Also ensure your basic Linux skills are up to scratch. This helps a lot in CKS.
- Know the common CLI tools like awk, sed, grep, find, cut, wc etc. etc.
- Know how to write simple one line for loops in bash - useful for iterating the output of a JSONPATH expression.
- Know the basics of managing daemons with systemctl.
These will save much time in CKS exam
1 Like
Thanks Alistair, I’ve been using Linux for 20+ years (15 as sysadmin and network engineer) so I have that basic knowledge, BTW thank you for the hints, it’s always useful info for other people 
That tools are also useful to know when doing CKA. BTW I’m also following your LFCS course to keep myself up-to-date
I’ll post two links to my stories on Medium, hoping not to violate any rule here (it’s free stuff, not monetized). Maybe they can be useful for someone here.
My Journey to CKA
Intel Nuc 10/Proxmox VE Home-Lab
Sounds like you’re well placed. You should ace it!
Articles are great!
1 Like
@Alistair_KodeKloud one more question about CKS, since I may subscribe to a premium plan given the discounts and start studying for that certification: is the content/labs always up-to-date with recent versions of K8S and other software like Falco? I can understand that the videos can’t be updated as soon as a new version is out but I’m thinking about new lessons added to clarify the changes and help us be up-to-date with most recent exam changes.
Thank you in advance,
Gianni
The lab technology is updated as required, such as when a change in Kubernetes version has a direct impact on the questions in the exam. The last such change was 1.24 when PSP was retired in favor of PSA. Everything that’s in the exam currently is valid on 1.24 (even though the GA version is currently 1.30).
As for other tools, as an example there is a ticket going through right now to upgrade the trivy version.
1 Like
Thank you very much for the quick answer!