Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Common mistakes

• ✕Preparing as though it were a written exam. Reading about etcd backup is not the same as having run one under a clock.
• ✕Not setting up the terminal first. Shell completion, an alias for kubectl and a default namespace pay for themselves within minutes.
• ✕Losing time hunting through documentation. Knowing where an example lives matters more than remembering the YAML.
• ✕Forgetting to set the correct context. Tasks span multiple clusters, and work done in the wrong one scores zero.
• ✕Leaving tasks untouched. Partial credit is real, so a rough attempt beats a blank.
• ✕Building manifests by hand when kubectl can generate them. Dry-run output plus a small edit is far faster than typing YAML from scratch.

Exam-day tips

• ✓Read every task's cluster context line first and switch before you touch anything.
• ✓Triage by weight, not order. Troubleshooting is 30% of the score — do not let an expensive task expire while you polish a cheap one.
• ✓Generate YAML with --dry-run=client -o yaml and edit it rather than writing manifests by hand.
• ✓Verify each task before moving on. A quick get or describe catches the mistakes that silently cost full marks.
• ✓Use the Quick Reference links in the exam UI — they are curated for the task in front of you and faster than searching.
• ✓Flag and return. Two hours across 15–20 tasks is tight, and one stubborn task can swallow the exam.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (66%) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.