Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• ConfigMaps and Secrets — 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

Know these cold:

• Pod design: init containers, sidecars, and multi-container patterns
• Jobs and CronJobs, including completions, parallelism and failure handling
• Volumes — emptyDir, PersistentVolumeClaims, and when each fits
• Building and referencing container images correctly

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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

Know these cold:

• 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 — a wrong choice here 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.
• ✓Weight your time: Environment, Configuration and Security is 25% — the largest domain and worth protecting time for.
• ✓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. 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.