Thank you @Mumshad Mannambeth and *<https://app.slack.com/team/U01PP2F8NCC|@unni . . .

Kubernetes-Slack Discussions
#1

Vladan Divac:
Thank you @Mumshad Mannambeth and https://app.slack.com/team/U01PP2F8NCC|@unnivkn for creating this amazing course! It was really fun to learn from your videos and enforce our knowledge in KodeKloud labs. My experience regarding preparation for the exam and some tips for future candidates are in the thread below

#2

Vladan Divac:
My preparation timeline:
• I had 9 months of exposure to K8s on my job before I started this course. I prepared for this exam for 4 weeks, 1-2 hours/day (including weekends)
• I went through all videos and labs once. Then I watched for the 2nd time about 1/4 of video materials that I was less familiar with and then did all the labs and mock exams for the 2nd time
• I then started a free killer.sh session (valid for 36h) that comes with your exam purchase. I timed my self to 2h to have realistic testing experience and tried to solve as many questions as I can. I scored only 68 (out of 128). Then I analysed provided solutions and went for two more attempts (going over the same 25 questions) scoring 108/128 and 128/128
• Scheduled the exam the next day

#3

Vladan Divac:
My tips for future candidates:

#4

Vladan Divac:
• Difficulty of questions on the CKA exam is similar to the Kodekloud mock exams. The killer.sh questions are significantly harder and have more subtasks to complete. I think that it is still a worthwhile experience do go over killer.sh questions for two reasons:

  1. The killer.sh UI is very similar to the actual UI on the CKA exam. You need to switch to different clusters for different questions. Get your self familiar with the exam environment.
  2. You will likely identify your weak areas and fill in few gaps going over killer.sh solutions.
    That having said, do these sessions at the very end of your preparation. Don’t be disheartened if you score low in your first killer.sh attempt!
#5

Vladan Divac:
• On the exam go with easy questions first to build up your confidence. There are questions worth 7% that take 10min to complete while there are 5% questions which can literally be done in less than a minute! I would say as a rule of thumb to skip everything >=7% for the 2nd round and finish off these easier 4-5% questions in the first round. Then go over harder questions in the 2nd round. You don’t want to spend precious minutes troubleshooting why e.g. some network policy is not working while there are easy fruits hanging around. Try to optimise your points/minute ratio. At least, this approach worked well for me.

#6

Vladan Divac:
• Make bookmarks to K8s documentation with relevant yaml sections. Don’t rely to built-in search box function for two reasons:

  1. Some reported that for their combination of OS+browser the search box was not working (It was working for me though MacOS+Chrome)
  2. Search results could point to websites that are not allowed (e.g. http://discussion.kubernetes.io|discussion.kubernetes.io). You can accidentally click on these in the heat of the moment and get disqualified.
    I would say put everything that you searched for in K8s doc while practicing mock_exams/killer.sh under a bookmark.
#7

Vladan Divac:
• Always execute the given command to get you to the right K8s cluster. You don’t want to correctly create requested K8s objects on the wrong cluster since you will receive 0% score for that! Make your self a habit when practicing killer.sh session to always go to the right cluster first.

#8

Vladan Divac:
• When practicing on killer.sh I saw that I was struggling with yaml when there are larger block of yaml that need to be copy-pasted and edited (e.g. the question with inter-pod anti-affinity rules). I spent lot of time aligning these lines correctly and taking care of some invisible tabs that were making my yaml file invalid. This prompted me to learn more on tabs/alignments in vi. I recommend to set your vi editor for yaml editing by putting:

set tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab

into ~/.vimrc file at the beginning of your exam. With this, you can e.g. select misaligned block (Shift+v and up/down arrows) and align it (e.g. move it 6 spaces to the right) by just pressing 3&gt; (shfit 3 widths to the right) much more quickly and reliably then editing line-by-line

#9

Vladan Divac:
• I also went through setting up K8s the hard way but I do not recommend this exercise for CKA exam. You have everything needed related to cluster interworking covered in materials and in K8s the hard way you spend more than 1/2 time creating TLS certificates for different components.

#10

Vladan Divac:
End verdict: Course materials/labs + killer.sh session is everything you need to pass this certificate with confidence!

#11

Vladan Divac:
Good luck to future candidates!

#12

unnivkn:
Hi @Vladan Divacgreat tips to everyone planning to write the exam… Thanks for this nice write up.

#13

Pankaj Chandna:
Great pointers @Vladan Divac… Congratulations on completing your certification!!

#14

Paul:
Congrats @Vladan Divac awesome tips

#15

Adeola Adefolaju:
Congratulations @Vladan Divac. Thanks for the tips.