CKA Exam Study Guide (Certified Kubernetes Administrator)

CKA - Certified Kubernetes Administrator Certificate Exam Study Guide

How to Prepare for the CKA Exam?

Preparing for the CKA Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam? Don’t know where to start? This post is the CKA Kubernetes Administrator Certification Exam Preparation Study Guide (with links to each exam objective).

I have curated a list of articles from the Kubernetes documentation and other blogs on the web for each objective of the CKA Certification exam. Please share the post within your circles so it helps them to prepare for the exam.

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CKA Kubernetes Administrator Online Course

LinkedIn Learning (Free trial) Certified Kubernetes Administrator Cert Prep
Pluralsight Kubernetes Admin, Certificate Learning Path
Whizlabs Kubernetes Administrator Course
Udemy Kubernetes Certification Preparation by Zeal

CKA Kubernetes Admin. Practice Test/Guide

Udemy Practice Tests Kubernetes Administration Practice Test
Amazon e-book (PDF) Hands-on Guide to Kubernetes exam

CKA Kubernetes Administrator Other Materials

Linux Foundation BootcampCloud Engineer Bootcamp [24 weeks]
Coursera Fundamentals of Kubernetes Deployment

Check out all the other DevOps/Kubernetes certificate study guides

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Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration – 25%

Manage Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

Configure RBAC in your Kubernetes cluster

Other material related to Kubernetes RBAC:

Use Kubeadm to Install a Basic Cluster

Creating a cluster with kubeadm

Installing kubeadm toolbox

Creating Highly Available clusters with kubeadm

Set up a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm

Installing Kubernetes with Kubeadm: A quick and dirty guide

Installing a cluster on Ubuntu

Manage a Highly-available Kubernetes Cluster

Options for Highly Available topology

Set up High-Availability Kubernetes Masters

Setup highly available Kubernetes cluster with Kubeadm

Creating Highly Available clusters with kubeadm

Other blog posts to refer

Provision Underlying Infrastructure to Deploy a Kubernetes Cluster

Kubernetes infrastructure

Deploy an AKS cluster using the Azure portal

Deploy a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on AWS

Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning – Google Cloud Platform

What is Kubernetes infrastructure?

Deploy Kubernetes on hosted cloud infrastructure

Perform a Version Upgrade on a Kubernetes Cluster Using Kubeadm

Kubeadm upgrade

Upgrading kubeadm clusters

Kubernetes upgrade: The definitive guide to Do-It-Yourself

Upgrading clusters to newer Kubernetes versions

Upgrading self-hosted Kubernetes

Upgrading Kubernetes in Cloud providers

Implement etcd Backup and Restore

Backing up an etcd cluster

Restoring an etcd cluster

Backup & restore a Kubernetes master with Kubeadm

Other articles on etcd backup & restore

CKA Kubernetes up and running

Amazon link (affiliate)

Workloads & Scheduling – 15%

Understand Deployments and How to Perform Rolling Update and Rollbacks

Deployments in Kubernetes

Kubernetes deployments: The ultimate guide

How do Kubernetes deployments work?

Kubernetes deployments: An introduction

What is a Kubernetes deployment?

Rolling update

Rollback deployments

Perform a Rollback on a DaemonSet

How do you roll back deployments in Kubernetes?

Rolling updates & Rollbacks using Kubernetes Deployments

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Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to Configure Applications

What are ConfigMaps in Kubernetes?

Ultimate Guide to ConfigMaps in Kubernetes

Kubernetes ConfigMaps and Secrets

An Introduction to Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps

Create and use ConfigMaps in Kubernetes

Configuring applications

Know How to Scale Applications

Scaling your application

Running multiple instances of your app

Interactive tutorial – scaling your app

Autoscaling in Kubernetes

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

Kubernetes autoscaling – 3 common methods explained

Scaling Kubernetes on application & infrastructure levels

Scaling Kubernetes: Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling

How to scale a deployment within a Kubernetes cluster

Understand the Primitives Used to Create Robust, Self-healing, Application Deployments

What are Kubernetes API primitives?

Understand self-healing

Kubernetes. Replication and self-healing

How to develop self-healing apps: 4 key patterns

True reliability requires self-healing nodes & managing infrastructure

Self-healing Kubernetes

Decoding the self-healing Kubernetes: Step-by-step

Reliable, Self-Healing Kubernetes Explained

Self-Healing Applications with Kubernetes and Spring Boot

Understand How Resource Limits Can Affect Pod Scheduling

Understanding Kubernetes limits and requests by example

Kubernetes best practices: Resource requests and limits

Kubernetes Resources Requests and Limits 101

Resource Quotas in Kubernetes

How Pods with resource limits are run

Pod scheduling

Awareness of Manifest Management and Common Templating Tools

What is a Kubernetes Manifest?

Deploy Kubernetes manifests

The beginners guide to creating Kubernetes manifests

Kubernetes manifest task in Azure

Kubernetes templating tools

Services & Networking – 20%

Understand Host Networking Configuration on the Cluster Nodes

Cluster networking in Kubernetes

Starting a container with host networking enabled

A hacker’s guide to Kubernetes networking

A guide to the Kubernetes networking model

Kubernetes cluster networking 101

Kubernetes networking demystified

Kubernetes cluster networking components

Understand Connectivity between Pods

Introduction to Kubernetes pod networking

Understanding Kubernetes networking: pods

Review pod-to-pod communications in Kubernetes

Exposing pods to the cluster

Kubernetes pod networking

Understand ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer Service Types and Endpoints

ClusterIP

NodePort

Understanding their differences

Know How to Use Ingress Controllers and Ingress Resources

Kubernetes ingress controllers

Ingress resources

Know How to Configure and Use CoreDNS

What is CoreDNS?

Understanding CoreDNS in Kubernetes

Using CoreDNS for service discovery

How to deploy CoreDNS in Kubernetes?

Configuring DNS servers for Kubernetes clusters

Create custom DNS entries with CoreDNS

CoreDNS on cloud platforms

Choose an Appropriate Container Network Interface Plugin

What is Container Network Interface (CNI)?

Introduction to CNI, the Container Network Interface

Container Networking Interface aka CNI

Network plugins in Kubernetes

Understanding container network interface plugins

Container Networking Interface landscape

Choosing a Kubernetes CNI plugin

Storage – 10%

Understand Storage Classes, Persistent Volumes​

Storage classes

Persistent Volumes

Understand Volume Mode, Access Modes and Reclaim Policies for Volumes

Volume Mode in Kubernetes

Access Modes

Reclaim policies for Volumes

Understand Persistent Volume Claims Primitive

PersistentVolumeClaims

What is PersistentVolumeClaim?

Introduction to PersistentVolumeClaims

Create a PersistentVolumeClaim

Provisioning a Persistent Volume Claim

PVC – GitHub issue

Know How to Configure Applications with Persistent Storage

Understanding Kubernetes storage basics

Kubernetes Persistent Storage: Why, Where, and How?

Persistent storage

How volumes and storage work in Kubernetes

Why is storage on Kubernetes so hard?

A complete storage guide for your Kubernetes storage problems

Get started provisioning storage in Kubernetes

Troubleshooting – 30%

Evaluate Cluster and Node Logging

Logging architecture

A practical guide to Kubernetes logging

A complete guide to Kubernetes logging

Cluster-level logging with Kubernetes

Cluster-level logging in Kubernetes with Fluentd

Managing cluster logs with IBM Log Analysis

Collecting application logs on Kubernetes

Kubernetes logging through Logspout

Understand How to Monitor Applications

Introduction to Kubernetes monitoring

Tools for monitoring resources

Kubernetes monitoring best practices

A complete introduction to monitoring Kubernetes

9 top open-source tools for monitoring Kubernetes

Monitoring Kubernetes in production

Monitoring applications

Manage Container stdout & stderr Logs

Kubernetes – mount container stdout stderr logs

Collect log files inside the container

View logs for a container or service

Troubleshoot Application Failure

Troubleshoot Applications

Application Introspection and Debugging

How-to Guide: Debug a Kubernetes application

GitHub: Troubleshooting Kubernetes apps

Learn how to troubleshoot applications running on Kubernetes

Simplified K8s troubleshooting with app-centric abstraction

Troubleshooting applications In Kubernetes

Debug running Pods

Debug Services

Troubleshoot Cluster Component Failure

Troubleshoot Clusters

Cluster troubleshooting guide

Troubleshooting cluster issues

Troubleshooting Kubernetes

Troubleshoot Networking

Troubleshooting Kubernetes networking issues

How to troubleshoot Kubernetes network issues?

Inspect Kubernetes networking

Troubleshooting Kubernetes networking on Windows

Kubernetes troubleshooting: Networking & DNS connectivity

Understand & troubleshoot the “Magic” of Kubernetes networking

Debugging Kubernetes networking

This brings us to the end of the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam Preparation Study Guide.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments section if I have missed out on anything. Also, I love to hear from you about how your preparation is going on!

In case you are preparing for other DevOps / Kubernetes certification exams, check out the Kubernetes study guides for those exams.

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