CKA Expert

This is the version 1.9 curriculum of Kubernauts Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam.

If you see an issue with the document, please open an issue. Minor issues may be addressed with updates. Major issue will require updates to the document which will come with new versions of the exam, generally coinciding with new version of Kubernetes.

This document provides the curriculum outline of the Knowledge, Skills and Abilities that a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) can be expected to demonstrate.

CKA Curriculum V 1.9

Source: https://github.com/cncf/curriculum

5% - Scheduling

• Use label selectors to schedule Pods

• Understand the role of DaemonSets

• Understand how resource limits can affect Pod scheduling

• Understand how to run multiple schedulers and how to configure Pods to use them

• Manually schedule a pod without a scheduler

• Display scheduler events

• Know how to configure the Kubernetes scheduler

5% - Logging/Monitoring

• Understand how to monitor all cluster components

• Understand how to monitor applications

• Manage cluster component logs

• Manage application logs

8% - Application Lifecycle Management

• Understand Deployments and how to perform rolling updates and rollbacks

• Know various ways to configure applications

• Know how to scale applications

• Understand the primitives necessary to create a self-healing application

11% - Cluster Maintenance

• Understand Kubernetes cluster upgrade process

• Facilitate operating system upgrades

• Implement backup and restore methodologies

12% - Security

• Know how to configure authentication and authorization

• Understand Kubernetes security primitives

• Know to configure network policies

• Create and manage TLS certificates for cluster components

• Work with images securely

• Define security contexts

• Secure persistent key value store

• Work with role-based access control

7% - Storage

• Understand persistent volumes and know how to create them

• Understand access modes for volumes

• Understand persistent volume claims primitive

• Understand Kubernetes storage objects

• Know how to configure applications with persistent storage

10% - Troubleshooting

• Troubleshoot application failure

• Troubleshoot control plane failure

• Troubleshoot worker node failure

• Troubleshoot networking

19% - Core Concepts

• Understand the Kubernetes API primitives

• Understand the Kubernetes cluster architecture

• Understand Services and other network primitives

11% - Networking

• Understand the networking configuration on the cluster nodes

• Understand Pod networking concepts

• Understand service networking

• Deploy and configure network load balancer

• Know how to use Ingress rules

• Know how to configure and use the cluster DNS

• Understand CNI

12% - Installation, Confguration & Validation

• Design a Kubernetes cluster

• Install Kubernetes masters and nodes, including the use of TLS bootstarpping

• Configure secure cluster communications

• Configure a Highly-Available Kubernetes cluster

• Know where to get the Kubernetes release binaries

• Provision underlying infrastructure to deploy a Kubernetes cluster

• Choose a network solution

• Choose your Kubernetes infrastructure configuration

• Run end-to-end tests on your cluster

• Analyse end-to-end tests results

• Run Node end-to-end tests