How I Passed the CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) Exam

I’ve just passed the CKA. 🎉 Here’s exactly how I prepared, what I practiced, how I set up my terminal, and the mindset I used on exam day. No spoilers, no NDA violations—just the process that worked for me. TL;DR Learn by doing: daily labs > passive videos. Automate muscle memory: aliases, completion, templates. Use kubectl explain + --dry-run=client -o yaml to avoid YAML typos. Be ruthless with time: solve, verify, move on, return later. My 4-Week Study Plan Week 1 — Core Workloads & Kubectl Pods, Deployments, DaemonSets, Jobs/CronJobs Services (ClusterIP/NodePort/LoadBalancer), Probes, ConfigMaps, Secrets Hands-on: create → tweak → roll back → scale Week 2 — Cluster Admin Basics Control plane components, kubelet & static Pods, kubeadm basics Node ops: cordon/drain/uncordon, taints/tolerations Backups (etcd snapshot/restore concepts), upgrades flow Week 3 — Networking & Storage CNI basics, NetworkPolicies, Ingress StorageClasses, PV/PVC, CSI, access modes, reclaim policies Week 4 — Security & Troubleshooting RBAC (Roles, ClusterRoles, Bindings), ServiceAccounts Scheduling (affinity/anti-affinity, topology spread), resources/limits Troubleshooting: events/logs, image pulls, CrashLoopBackOff, DNS Daily rhythm: 60–90 min labbing + 15–30 min notes + quick review of mistakes. ...

August 27, 2025 · 5 min · Umberto Domenico Ciccia

Cka Notes

Core concepts Cluster Architecture Master node: orchestrate nodes → schedule, monitor, worker, state, manage cluster Worker node: host applications as container Master node components: ETCD: database of the state of the cluster KUBE-SCHEDULER: schedule pods to worker nodes CONTROLLER-MANAGER NODE-CONTROLLER: orchestrate nodes REPLICATION-CONTROLLER: orchestrate replication groups KUBE-APISERVER: expose k8s cluster from external thought api Worker node components: CONTAINER RUNTIME: container runtime engine KUBELET: agent that run in every node, for receive api call from api server KUBE-PROXY: manage communication between container, nodes Container runtime interface Container runtime interface CRI: allow to use k8s with all container runtime ...

August 6, 2025 · 22 min · Umberto Domenico Ciccia