How to use this guide
Give each domain study time in proportion to its official weighting. The percentages below are where your marks actually come from. Work through the domains in order, then let your per-domain practice scores show you what to go back to.
The fastest way to improve: read one domain’s focus areas, take a practice run, then read the explanation for every question you missed before moving on. The explanations are where the learning happens. Skipping them is the most common reason people stop improving.
1. Troubleshooting
30% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Diagnosing failing pods from events, logs and describe output
- Fixing cluster component failures: kubelet, control plane statics, certificates and kubeconfig
- Debugging the network: DNS resolution, service endpoints, and pod-to-pod connectivity
- Reading node conditions, resource pressure, taints and evictions
2. Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration
25% of the examWhat to focus on:
- RBAC: roles, cluster roles, bindings and service accounts
- Cluster lifecycle with kubeadm: bootstrap, join, and version upgrades
- etcd backup and restore, which shows up as an exam task again and again
- Managing extensions and cluster components with Helm and manifests
3. Services & Networking
20% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Choosing a service type: ClusterIP, NodePort or LoadBalancer
- Routing HTTP with Ingress and the Gateway API
- Isolating pods with NetworkPolicy
- CoreDNS behaviour and in-cluster service discovery
4. Workloads & Scheduling
15% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Deployments, rolling updates and rollbacks
- ConfigMaps and Secrets injected as environment variables or volumes
- Controlling scheduling with requests and limits, node selectors, affinity, taints and tolerations
- DaemonSets, StatefulSets, Jobs and CronJobs, and when each fits
5. Storage
10% of the examWhat to focus on:
- 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.
- Skipping terminal setup. Shell completion, a kubectl alias and a default namespace pay for themselves within minutes.
- Hunting through documentation mid-task. Knowing where an example lives matters more than remembering the YAML.
- Forgetting the cluster 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.
- Typing manifests by hand when kubectl can generate them. Dry-run output plus a small edit is far faster.
Exam-day tips
- Switch context first. Read every task's cluster context line before you touch anything.
- Triage by weight, not order. Troubleshooting is 30% of the score, so 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 mistakes that would silently cost you 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 to 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. What counts is scoring at or above the real pass mark (66%) across several full-length sets in a row, with no single domain trailing far behind the others. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.
Free, full-length, and weighted to the official blueprint. Every answer is explained.
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