So, Yesterday I appeared for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam, which is one of the coolest and simplest ones in the Kubernetes series of certifications.

This exam focuses on all the aspects of K8S which is required by a developer/admin to build, deploy, scale, and do other useful pieces of stuff for the applications. If we try to bullet point these, those would be:

• Application Design and Build
• Application Deployment
• Application Observability and Maintenance
• Application Environment, Configuration and Security
• Services and Networking

Finally, he is talking about the exam !!

I don't want to put "TL;DR" 😋 , So directly coming to the exam details:

After CNCF announces the changes in the CKAD exam pattern last year in Sep 2021, There are a few new things in the curriculum

• Define, build and modify container images
• Use Kubernetes primitives to implement common deployment strategies (e.g. blue/ green or canary)
• Use the Helm package manager to deploy existing packages
• Understand API depredations
• Discover and use resources that extend Kubernetes (CRD)
• Understand authentication, authorization and admission control

There was at least one question from all the above points in the exam. As far as I recall, most of them were 8% of the weightage.

Scenarios:

There were total 16 questions in the exam that needed to be completed in 2 hours of time.

Question 1 :

• Deploy a pod name james with nginx:alpine image.
• Create a secret name sample-secret with date key1=value1.
• Add an environment variable FRONT_ROW and use the created secret's key1's value as value for the ENV variable.

Question 2:

• Create a Docker image with the given Dockerfile. Tag for the docker was given in the question.
• Export the docker image as OCI-format to create a tar file with that.

Question 3:

• Create a cronjob with the given name. Image, Schedule was given in the question.
• Keep 3 success and 2 Failed history configuration
• Terminate the pod after 8 seconds
• Run a job from the cronjob we created.

Question 4:

• Create a canary deployment for a given Application.
• Sent 30% of the traffic to the deployed canary pods. Service was already present for the application

Question 5:

• There was a deployment file that was defined as the k8s version 1.15. Like apiVersion was old, the definition file was also in the old format. We needed to change it according to the latest version of the Kubernetes, i.e. 1.23

Question 6:

• There was one application which was getting failed in some namespace. We need to find out the reason for the failure.
• Write the / in a mentioned file.
• Write down the kubectl get events for that failing application in a mentioned file.
• Fix the issue.

Question 7:

• There was an application running in some namespace which was getting failed due to low resource allocation, needed to assign it the proper resource.
• Scale the application to 5 pods.

Question 8:

• Deployment file was already given for an application. We needed to modify the apiVerision.
• Run a POD with 30001 user
• Disable privilege escalation for the pod

Question 8:

• Update a given deployment with the RollingUpdate strategy
• Surge 5 and max unavailable 40%

Question 9:

• Application architecture was given in a diagram. We needed to create a Network Policy for the database pods to accept the traffic only from the API pods.
• Needed to create a network policy to deny all requests to the frontend from a specific IP.

Question 10:

• Create a pod with the Nginx image and expose that pod to port 8083 port. Labels were given for the pod which we needed to use in the POD definition file.
• Create a service for that pod and expose that to a NodePort 30080 port

Question 11:

• Create a persistent volume with the given access modes, type and storage 1Gi. The name of the PV was given.
• Create a persistent volume claim with the 200Mi. PVC name was given
• Use this in a Deployment definition file and send the log of the pod to the volume attached at the given location.

Question 12:

• Create a Pod definition file with the given name, image and labels.
• Run the given command at the startup of the pod.

Question 13:

• Deployment rollout with the image change without changing the Deployment file.
• Return to the previous version of the rollout

A couple of more questions were there, which I am not able to recall right now. As I will remember them, I will keep on adding them.

Time Management is the key:

Time Management is very important in these exams. You need to have enough practice for the kubectl commands (Imperative commands) to identify the issues, Listing, making changes. This saves a lot of time.

That's all for this blog. Feel free to drop comments if you have any further questions :)