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Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

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About the CKA exam

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam, run by the Linux Foundation with the CNCF, is for people who build and look after Kubernetes clusters: platform engineers, SREs and operations staff. It proves you can set up a cluster with kubeadm, keep it running, upgrade it, control who can do what in it, and work out why something inside it is broken.

There are no multiple-choice questions on the real exam. You get a remote Linux desktop and a set of tasks, each on a named cluster, and you solve them at the command line with kubectl, editors and the usual node tools. A task might be "this node is NotReady, fix it" or "create a NetworkPolicy so only the frontend can reach the database". You are graded on the state the cluster ends up in, so speed and comfort with kubectl matter as much as knowing the theory.

Exam format

  • Tasks: 15 to 20 performance-based tasks, solved on the command line of live clusters.
  • Time: 2 hours.
  • Passing score: 66%.
  • Cost: 445 USD for the exam alone. The price includes one retake and two sessions on a practice simulator, and you have 12 months from purchase to sit the exam.
  • Delivery: online, with a remote proctor. During the exam you may open the Kubernetes documentation and blog, the Helm docs and the Gateway API docs, and nothing else.
  • Validity: 2 years.

What the exam covers

The current curriculum has five domains:

  • Troubleshooting (30%). The largest domain: broken nodes and kubelets, failed control plane components, Pods that won't start, reading container logs and events, checking resource usage, and Services or DNS that don't resolve or route.
  • Cluster Architecture, Installation and Configuration (25%). RBAC roles and bindings, building a cluster with kubeadm, upgrades and other lifecycle work, highly available control planes, Helm and Kustomize, the CNI, CSI and CRI plug-in interfaces, and CRDs with operators.
  • Services and Networking (20%). How Pods reach each other, NetworkPolicies, ClusterIP, NodePort and LoadBalancer Services, Ingress and the Gateway API, and CoreDNS.
  • Workloads and Scheduling (15%). Deployments with rolling updates and rollbacks, ConfigMaps and Secrets, autoscaling, self-healing, and controlling where Pods are placed with taints, tolerations, affinity and resource requests.
  • Storage (10%). StorageClasses and dynamic provisioning, access modes and reclaim policies, and binding PersistentVolumeClaims to PersistentVolumes.

How the practice questions here are organised

There is one 10-question practice test for the CKA so far. It touches RBAC, a kubeadm worker node upgrade, taints versus affinity, rolling out a ConfigMap change, headless Services, default-deny NetworkPolicies and DNS, PersistentVolume reclaim policy, cross-namespace DNS and two troubleshooting cases: a Pending Pod and a broken API server static Pod.

Be clear about what these questions can and can't do. The real exam is hands-on: you type commands into live clusters. These are multiple-choice questions, so they check the knowledge behind the tasks (which field to change, which component to look at, what a symptom means), not your ability to do it quickly at a terminal. Use them to find gaps in understanding, then close those gaps in a real cluster. Each question explains the right answer and every wrong one and links to the Kubernetes documentation it is based on.

A study plan that works

  • Take the practice test first to see which areas are weak, then spend most of your time at a terminal, not reading.
  • Build a cluster with kubeadm yourself, at least twice, on local VMs or cheap cloud machines. Then upgrade it one minor version, control plane first, then each worker.
  • Break things on purpose: stop the kubelet, put a typo in a static Pod manifest under /etc/kubernetes/manifests, delete a CoreDNS Pod. Fixing them is the Troubleshooting domain, which is almost a third of the score.
  • Learn to generate YAML instead of writing it: kubectl create ... --dry-run=client -o yaml and kubectl explain save minutes on every task.
  • Practise finding pages in the Kubernetes documentation quickly, since that is the only reference you get on the day.
  • Use the two included simulator sessions near the end. Their tasks are meant to be harder than the exam's, so a low score there is normal.

These questions are original, written from the public Kubernetes documentation and the official CKA curriculum. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with the Linux Foundation or the CNCF.