How I Passed the CKA

I finally passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam. ☸️

I’ve been working with DevOps and Kubernetes for a while, so taking the CKA felt like a good way to strengthen my Kubernetes fundamentals and get more comfortable working with Kubernetes from the command line.

It was also one of those certifications where I knew watching courses alone wasn’t going to be enough.

I had to actually use Kubernetes.

How I prepared

I spent most of my preparation time doing hands-on labs.

I used KodeKloud for the learning material and labs, and spent a lot of time working directly with Kubernetes instead of just watching videos.

My approach was pretty simple:

Learn something → practice it → break it → fix it.

That worked much better for me than trying to memorize commands.

I practiced things like:

• Pods and Deployments
• Services and Networking
• ConfigMaps and Secrets
• Storage
• RBAC
• Scheduling
• Cluster maintenance
• Troubleshooting
• Ingress
• etcd
• Static Pods
• Node management

The more I practiced, the more I realized that Kubernetes isn’t really about remembering hundreds of commands.

It’s about knowing where to look when something doesn’t work.

The part that helped me the most

Troubleshooting.

During my preparation, I intentionally spent a lot of time breaking things.

I’d deploy something, make a configuration mistake, and then try to figure out why it wasn’t working.

Sometimes it was a wrong selector.

Sometimes a pod wouldn’t start.

Sometimes a service wasn’t reachable.

Sometimes a node had a problem.

That process taught me much more than simply following a lab step by step.

I started getting into the habit of checking things in a particular order:

kubectl get pods
kubectl describe pod <pod>
kubectl logs <pod>
kubectl get events