Acing your CKA and CKAD exams
I scored 99/100 for my CKAD and 90/100 for my CKA exams so I would say I did pretty well.
I took CKAD first, followed by a 2-month break and then CKA.
In this article, I hope to share with you how I studied for these exams and the resources that have helped me.
My experience with Kubernetes
When I took the exams, I had <1 year of experience as a software engineer and my current job is my first one after graduating from university. I did deploy some things at work to production with Kubernetes. However, other than that, I did not use it everyday and it is not my main job.
Difference between CKAD and CKA exams
Topics tested (taken from Linux Foundation website):
There are some overlapping topics between CKAD and CKA, such as storage, ingress and network policy.
Studying for one exam would greatly benefit you for the other exam.
Difficulty level:
These exams are practical exams, not MCQs. To excel in such exams, practice is key.
From my experience, there are a lot more CKAD questions freely available as compared to CKA questions. This means you can practise so much more for CKAD than CKA, making it easier to gain proficiency in CKAD topics and ace the exam.
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Also, the reason why there are so many more CKAD questions than CKA is because CKAD is easier to test than CKA. CKAD is about application deployment. This means you have unlimited things to deploy. However, for CKA, exam questions are limited to the cluster, such as the api server and kubelet.
Which to do first?
I would encourage everyone to do CKAD first as it is the easier exam. Additionally, with more CKAD questions, you get more practice with kubectl and overlapping topics tested in the CKA, such as network policy.
My study plan
CKAD
The ckad-dojo is an excellent platform to practice CKAD. It has 11 practice exams, giving you a whopping 218 questions to practise. Launching the test environment and grading are seamless.
Additionally, the platform makes it a joy to learn Kubernetes and hone your problem solving skills. I am very grateful that such a platform exists.
Another useful resource is none other than the killer.sh simulation exams that allows you to have an experience as close to the exam as possible.
The killer.sh simulation exams are much more difficult than the actual exam. These simulation exams pack more tasks in a single question, making it extremely difficult to finish most questions in 2 hours. Even though I know how to do all the questions, I did not have time to complete all of them. If you can pass the simulation exams, I believe you should be ready for the actual exam.
I believe I took about 1.5–2 months to study for CKAD.
Ckad-dojo: https://github.com/TiPunchLabs/ckad-dojo
Killer.sh simulation exams: https://killer.sh/ckad
CKA
Unfortunately, there is no cka-dojo for CKA. It was a more difficult to find practice questions for CKA. These are 2 practices that I found that had many similar questions appear in the exam. CKA-PREP-2025-v2 comes with Youtube videos as well to explain the questions and solutions.
Similar to CKAD, CKA has killer.sh simulation exams too.
The CKAD killer.sh simulation exams pack many tasks in each question. You may know how to do all questions, but the challenge is completing all questions within the time limit.
As for CKA killer.sh simulation exams, they are much more technically challenging. It is not about the time, but whether you even know how to do the question. I barely passed both CKA killer.sh simulation exams and there were a ton of questions that I did not know how to solve.
I took about 3 weeks to prepare for CKA as I gained quite a bit of Kubernetes proficiency by studying for CKAD.
Practices: https://github.com/vj2201/CKA-PREP-2025-v2 and https://github.com/markdjones82/CKA-PREP-2025-v2/tree/custom-main
Killer.sh simulation exams: https://killer.sh/cka
Miscellaneous things
- For every mistake and question that you do not know how to do, make sure you note them down and revise them periodically. Do not just “fire and forget”, that is, read the solutions and forget what you learnt
- Many people have mentioned that you need to use the imperative way of deploying Kubernetes resources (using kubectl to create pods, deployments, services etc). Otherwise, you would not have sufficient time. I disagree. I love using the declarative way of deploying Kubernetes resources and I had sufficient time for both exams. Although certain imperative ways of deploying resources, such as `kubectl expose` saves a lot of time, you do not need to strictly use the imperative way all the time. Analyse the task and see which method is more efficient, rather than stick to one method
Thank you and I hope this guide helps you ace your Kubernetes exams!
