My CKA Experience

Yesterday, I took the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam and am pleased to report that I think I did quite well! 🎉🎉🎉

📝 The Exam Difficulty

I was able to complete all of the questions within about 50 minutes, leaving the 2-3 more time-consuming ones for the end. After finishing an initial run through all the questions, I decided to go through them again to verify my answers. I finished these 2 passes over exam within about 65-70 minutes, leaving me with around 50 minutes to go over the 3 more difficult question. Eventually, I managed to solve those as well, with about 10 minutes to spare!

In terms of difficulty, I found the average question to be much simpler than the mock exam from killer.sh and roughly on par with the KodeKloud labs.

📚 Useful Resources

I think the KodeKloud course is an invaluable resource for anyone preparing for the CKA, alongside their “Kubernetes Challenges” course. As a junior DevOps engineer with about 1.5 years of experience, I found the course to be extremely helpful. They covered all of the curriculum for the exam, and then some! In this regard, I agree with the people who praise this course as being the “Bible” for the CKA.

Overall, I believe that combining the KodeKloud course with the mock exam from killer.sh gives you a great foundation for success on the CKA. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to earn their certification and would go as far as to say that you can almost certainly pass with these 2 resources alone and nothing else.

💻 Technical Aspects

In addition to my experience with the actual exam content, it is worth mentioning that I encountered some issues with the proctoring software. Specifically, my webcam was unable to take a clear picture of my identification, so I had to grab a different laptop in order to take the exam. Aside from this minor inconvenience, I found the interface during the exam to be fairly responsive. I know there’s a lot of people out there who say it is bad, unusable and terrible, but that wasn’t my experience at all. While there were a couple of instances where the video feed would freeze for a second or two, overall it was a decent experience. All things considered, I was pleased with the technical aspects of the exam.

From the technical side, my advice is to have a decent external webcam with a long USB cable. I took the exam with the camera built in to the laptop and it was both funny and awkward when I had to pan it around the entire room to show my surroundings to the proctor. It would definitely be a lot easier to have a USB webcam.

💡 Conclusion

To sum this all up, I am happy to have successfully passed the CKA exam with a score of 95 and wholeheartedly recommend the KodeKloud course in tandem with the killer.sh mock exam to anyone interested in getting this certification.