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. Application Environment, Configuration and Security
25% of the examWhat to focus on:
- ConfigMaps and Secrets, both as environment variables and as mounted volumes
- SecurityContext: runAsUser, capabilities, and read-only root filesystems
- Resource requests and limits, and the QoS class they produce
- ServiceAccounts, RBAC from the workload's side, and CRDs
2. Application Design and Build
20% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Pod design: init containers, sidecars, and multi-container patterns
- Jobs and CronJobs, including completions, parallelism and failure handling
- Volumes: emptyDir and PersistentVolumeClaims, and when each fits
- Building and referencing container images correctly
3. Application Deployment
20% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Deployments: rolling updates, rollbacks and revision history
- Blue/green and canary approaches expressed in Kubernetes primitives
- Helm basics: installing and templating a chart
- Kustomize overlays for environment differences
4. Services and Networking
20% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Services and how selectors bind them to pods
- Ingress rules for HTTP routing
- NetworkPolicy for ingress and egress isolation
- Debugging why a service has no endpoints
5. Application Observability and Maintenance
15% of the examWhat to focus on:
- Liveness, readiness and startup probes, and the failure each prevents
- Reading logs and events to locate a fault fast
- kubectl debug and ephemeral containers
- Understanding the API deprecation cycle
Common mistakes
- Preparing as though it were a written exam. Reading about readiness probes is not the same as having fixed a service that never becomes ready.
- Not configuring the terminal first. An alias for kubectl, shell completion and a default namespace pay for themselves within minutes.
- Writing YAML from scratch instead of generating it. --dry-run=client -o yaml plus a small edit is several times faster.
- Forgetting the namespace. Tasks specify one, and work done in default scores zero.
- Confusing liveness with readiness probes. The wrong choice restarts a healthy pod or routes traffic to a broken one.
- Leaving tasks untouched. Partial credit is real, so a rough attempt always beats a blank.
Exam-day tips
- Check the namespace and context on every single task before you touch anything.
- Protect time for Environment, Configuration and Security. At 25% it is the largest domain.
- Generate manifests with kubectl rather than typing them, then edit.
- Verify with a quick get or describe before moving on. Silent failures cost full marks.
- Use the Quick Reference links in the exam UI; they are curated for the task and faster than searching.
- Flag and return. Two hours goes quickly, 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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