What changes with the CKA exam in September 2020?

CKA course change from September 2020

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation offers two Kubernetes Certification exams for Kubernetes, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer & Certified Kubernetes Administrator exams; in collaboration with The Linux Foundation. From September 2020, the Linux Foundation made some changes in the exam of CKA. The new exam is of 2 hours, instead of 3 hours, and gives a lot of weightage to Troubleshooting. Following are the Domain & Competencies, which the exam aims to check:-

• Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration – 25%
• Workloads & Scheduling – 15%
• Services & Networking – 20%
• Storage – 10%
• Troubleshooting – 30%

I have given the exam on 3rd September’20 and cleared it. From that experience, I would like to highlight the following:-

• It is not a disruptive change.
• It is now for 2 hours, which I believe sufficient to attempt 17 questions.
• The quality of the questions is better.
• The questions are as per the breakdown mentioned above. You should expect a good amount of questions on kubeadm, RBAC and Troubleshooting.
• The pass percentage is now 66%. I am not sure if this was changed from 74% earlier.

Some tips for exam preparation:-

• During the exam you can open kubernetes.io and reference its documentation, blogs, etc; so get familiar with navigating them. So when a question comes you can get reference resource templates (yamls) easily.
• Make yourself comfortable with the command line and vim Or I believe you can install emacs :).
• There is no alternative to practice, so practice well before you attempt the exam.

You might be aware that at CloudYuga, which I founded provides trainings for CKA and CKAD exams and during trainings I always tell following to the students:-

As exam participants, we worry too much about clearing the exam but at the same time, The Linux and Cloud-Native Foundations want more people to get certified. So they’ll not make the exam so though that only a few can clear. So just prepare well and attempt its in full confidence.

CloudYuga’s current CKA and CKAD online self-paced online training are based on a slightly older version of Kubernetes but we are in the process of updating them to the latest one. If you have taken our training then don’t worry as all of the content is still valid and you can clear the exam with sufficient practice.

I would be doing an open session on 23rd September at 7 PM IST to answer any of your questions w.r.t. to CKA and CKAD certification. Feel free to signup here.