Who Is It For
This certification is for Kubernetes engineers, cloud engineers and other IT professionals responsible for building, deploying, and configuring cloud native applications with Kubernetes.
About This Certification
CKAD has been developed by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to help expand the Kubernetes ecosystem through standardized training and certification. This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that consists of a set of performance-based tasks (problems) to be solved in a command line.
What It Demonstrates
The Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) can design, build and deploy cloud-native applications for Kubernetes.
A CKAD can define application resources and use Kubernetes core primitives to create/migrate, configure, expose and observe scalable applications.
The exam assumes working knowledge of container runtimes and microservice architecture.
The successful candidate will be comfortable:
– working with (OCI-compliant) container images
– applying Cloud Native application concepts and architectures
– working with and validating Kubernetes resource definitions
This exam curriculum includes these general domains and their weights on the exam:
- Application Design and Build – 20%
- Define, build and modify container images
- Understand Jobs and CronJobs
- Understand multi-container Pod design patterns (e.g. sidecar, init and others)
- Utilize persistent and ephemeral volumes
- Application Deployment – 20%
- Use Kubernetes primitives to implement common deployment strategies (e.g. blue/green or canary)
- Understand Deployments and how to perform rolling updates
- Use the Helm package manager to deploy existing packages
- Application Observability and Maintenance – 15%
- Understand API deprecations
- Implement probes and health checks
- Use provided tools to monitor Kubernetes applications
- Utilize container logs
- Debugging in Kubernetes
- Application Environment, Configuration and Security – 25%
- Discover and use resources that extend Kubernetes (CRD)
- Understand authentication, authorization and admission control
- Understanding and defining resource requirements, limits and quotas
- Understand ConfigMaps
- Create & consume Secrets
- Understand ServiceAccounts
- Understand SecurityContexts
- Services and Networking – 20%
- Demonstrate basic understanding of NetworkPolicies
- Provide and troubleshoot access to applications via services
- Use Ingress rules to expose applications
Exam Details & Resources
This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that consists of a set of performance-based tasks (problems) to be solved in a command line. Candidates have 2 hours to complete the tasks.
Candidates who register for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam will have 2 attempts (per exam registration) to an exam simulator, provided by Killer.sh.
The exam is based on Kubernetes v1.24.
The CKAD exam environment will be aligned with the most recent K8s minor version within approximately 4 to 8 weeks of the K8s release date
- Candidate Handbook
- Curriculum Overview
- Linux Foundation Global Certification and Confidentiality Agreement
- Exam Tips
- Frequently Asked Questions
Prerequisites
There are no pre-requisites for this exam.
