Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam objectives
Cloud Native Computing Foundation publishes 5 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from — study time should roughly follow it.
CKAAdvanced
1. Troubleshooting
30%- Diagnosing failing pods from events, logs and describe output
- Cluster component failures — kubelet, control plane statics, certificate and kubeconfig problems
- Network debugging: DNS resolution, service endpoints, and connectivity between pods
- Node conditions, resource pressure, taints and evictions
2. Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration
25%- RBAC — roles, cluster roles, bindings and service accounts
- Cluster lifecycle with kubeadm: bootstrap, join, and version upgrades
- etcd backup and restore, which is a recurring exam task
- Managing extensions and cluster components with Helm and manifests
3. Services & Networking
20%- Service types and when each applies — ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer
- Ingress and the Gateway API for HTTP routing
- NetworkPolicy for pod-to-pod isolation
- CoreDNS behaviour and in-cluster service discovery
4. Workloads & Scheduling
15%- Deployments, rolling updates and rollbacks
- ConfigMaps and Secrets injected as environment variables or volumes
- Scheduling control: resource requests and limits, node selectors, affinity, taints and tolerations
- DaemonSets, StatefulSets, Jobs and CronJobs, and when each fits
5. Storage
10%- PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims and how binding works
- StorageClasses and dynamic provisioning
- Access modes and reclaim policies
- Mounting volumes into pods, including emptyDir and hostPath trade-offs
Our practice exam distributes its questions across these exact domains at these weightings — so your score per domain tells you precisely where you stand.
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