The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam is a hands-on assessment of Kubernetes administration. Candidates work entirely from a Linux terminal, completing 15–20 practical tasks within two hours rather than answering multiple-choice questions. section 1.1
The exam connects operational Kubernetes work with its supporting platform components:
- Administer cluster architecture, installation, configuration, lifecycle, RBAC, and highly available control planes. section 1.1
- Create and manage clusters with kubeadm while understanding kubelet, systemd, and related Linux backend services. section 1.1
- Use Kubernetes administration tools and extension technologies including Helm, Kustomize, CNI, CSI, CRI, operators, and CRDs. section 1.1
A practical exam session
Switch among multiple clusters, verify the active context, and complete each requested administration task from the terminal. Use the official Kubernetes documentation as an open-book reference, then validate that the requested cluster state was achieved. section 9.7
Table 1.1 Exam competencies and percentages at which they will be tested on the exam
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Cluster Architecture, Installation, and Configuration: 25%
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• Manage role-based access control (RBAC)
• Implement and configure a highly available control plane
• Create and manage Kubernetes clusters using
kubeadm
• Manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters
• Prepare underlying infrastructure for installing a Kubernetes cluster
• Use Helm and Kustomize to install cluster components
• Understand extension interfaces like container network interface (CNI), container storage interface (CSI), and container runtime interface (CRI)
• Install and configure operators with an understanding of custom resource definitions (CRD)
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Workloads and Scheduling: 15%
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• Understand application deployments and how to perform rolling updates and rollbacks
• Use ConfigMaps and secrets to configure applications
• Configure workload autoscaling
• Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments
• Configure pod admission and scheduling (requests, limits, node affinity, etc.)
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Services and Networking: 20%
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• Understand host networking configuration on pods and nodes
• Define and enforce network policies
• Understand
ClusterIP,
NodePort, and
LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
• Know how to use ingress controllers and ingress resources
• Use Gateway API to manage ingress traffic
• Know how to configure and use
CoreDNS
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Storage: 10%
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• Implement storage classes and dynamic volume provisioning
• Configure volume types, access modes, and reclaim policies
• Manage persistent volumes and persistent volume claims
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Troubleshooting: 30%
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• Troubleshoot clusters and nodes
• Understand how to monitor cluster and application resource usage
• Manage and evaluate container logs from
stdout and
stderr
• Troubleshoot cluster component failure
• Troubleshoot services and networking
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Use the competency table to map study and practice to weighted domains such as cluster architecture, installation, configuration, workloads, and scheduling. section 1.1
