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Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

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Study guides

Kubernetes interview questions: scenarios for experiencedScenario-based Kubernetes interview questions for experienced engineers: CrashLoopBackOff, DNS, RBAC, drains and etcd, with the commands and fixes.
Best Kubernetes certification: CKA vs CKAD vs CKSWhich Kubernetes certification to take first - CKA, CKAD or CKS compared on format, cost, prerequisites and role, plus KCNA and KCSA for beginners.
Kubernetes NetworkPolicy, explained for CKA, CKAD and CKSHow NetworkPolicy isolation works, why policies only add allows, the namespaceSelector AND/OR trap, DNS egress, and what your CNI has to support.
Kubernetes Service types, Ingress and Gateway APIClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, ExternalName and headless Services, how selectors build endpoints, and how to debug a Service for CKA and CKAD.

About the CKAD exam

The Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam, run by the Linux Foundation with the CNCF, is aimed at the people who ship software onto Kubernetes rather than the people who run the cluster. It proves you can package an application, deploy and update it, configure it, keep it healthy and expose it to traffic, all with standard Kubernetes objects.

The real exam has no multiple-choice questions. You work in a remote Linux desktop against live clusters and complete a set of tasks at the command line: add a sidecar to a Pod, fix a Deployment whose Pods never become ready, mount a Secret as a file, write an Ingress rule. Each task is checked by the state you leave behind, so you need to be both correct and quick with kubectl.

Exam format

  • Tasks: 15 to 20 performance-based tasks, done on the command line.
  • Time: 2 hours.
  • Passing score: 66%.
  • Cost: 445 USD for the exam alone, which includes one retake and two practice simulator sessions. You have 12 months from purchase to take it.
  • Delivery: online, with a remote proctor. The Kubernetes documentation and blog and the Helm docs are the only references you may open.
  • Validity: 2 years.

What the exam covers

The curriculum has five domains:

  • Application Environment, Configuration and Security (25%). ConfigMaps and Secrets, resource requests, limits and quotas, ServiceAccounts, SecurityContexts and Linux capabilities, the basics of authentication, authorization and admission, and using CRDs and operators.
  • Application Design and Build (20%). Building and changing container images, choosing the right workload (Deployment, DaemonSet, Job, CronJob), multi-container patterns such as init containers and sidecars, and persistent and ephemeral volumes.
  • Application Deployment (20%). Rolling updates and rollbacks, blue/green and canary releases with plain Kubernetes objects, installing existing Helm charts, and Kustomize.
  • Services and Networking (20%). Exposing applications with Services, fixing a Service that reaches no Pods, Ingress rules, and basic NetworkPolicies.
  • Application Observability and Maintenance (15%). Liveness, readiness and startup probes, container logs, built-in monitoring commands, debugging failing Pods, and dealing with deprecated API versions.

How the practice questions here are organised

There is one 10-question practice test for the CKAD so far, with two questions from each domain: init container ordering and overlapping CronJob runs, rolling update surge settings and a blue/green Service cutover, startup probes for slow starters and reading a crashed container's previous logs, SecurityContext and OOMKilled memory limits, and Ingress path routing plus a Service with no endpoints.

The real CKAD is hands-on, and these are multiple-choice questions. They test the knowledge behind the tasks (which field controls what, what a symptom points to, which object fits the job) but not the typing or the time pressure of doing it live. Treat a wrong answer as a pointer to something to practise in a cluster. Every question explains why the right answer works and why each other option doesn't, with a link to the Kubernetes documentation.

A study plan that works

  • Take the practice test to find weak spots, then do most of your study in a real cluster. A local one from kind or minikube is enough for nearly everything on this exam.
  • Get fast at generating manifests: kubectl run, kubectl create deployment, kubectl create job and --dry-run=client -o yaml give you a starting file in seconds.
  • Use kubectl explain to find field names such as startupProbe or securityContext instead of writing them from memory.
  • Practise each probe type and watch what happens to a Pod when it fails. Then do the same for memory limits, missing ConfigMaps and wrong image names.
  • Deploy a small app end to end: Deployment, Service, Ingress, a ConfigMap, a Secret, then a rolling update and a rollback.
  • Save the two included simulator sessions for the last week or two. 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 CKAD curriculum. They are not real exam questions, and this site is not affiliated with the Linux Foundation or the CNCF.