Learning Materials:
I took couple of courses for learning the topics covered by this exam and one more for practice tests. The links are here
- KCNA Exam Prep from KodeKloud – https://learn.kodekloud.com/user/courses/kubernetes-and-cloud-native-associate-kcna
- KCNA Hands On Labs + Exam – https://www.udemy.com/course/dive-into-cloud-native-containers-kubernetes-and-the-kcna
- KCNA – Practice Exams – https://www.udemy.com/course/kcna-exams
The Udemy course was for fast track learners and the KodeKloud one goes slow and deep. I took the KodeKloud course after taking the Udemy course completely. There was a week of free learning on KodeKloud and I could complete 40% of the course. I also tried Ansible course on KodeKloud during that period and went for one year standard subscription. If you are into DevOps business seriously, KodeKloud offers a range of standard tutorials and labs.
The exam covers fundamentals of Kubernetes, Containers (Docker), Cloud Native Architecture (Serverless), Observability (Prometheus / Grafana), Application Delivery (ArgoCD / GitOps) and about CNCF. Have a look at the list of open source projects that CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) maintains –> https://landscape.cncf.io/
Exam Experience:
Similar to Terraform Associate exam, the KCNA exam has to be taken Online and Pearson Vue is not available. The exams questions/options will be straight forward and could be completed within 45 minutes. The exam will have questions on the kubectl command syntax for few scenarios and I created a list of commands from the courses –> K8 Commands. More theory questions will be on K8 components and objects – Eg. Role of Scheduler, Lifecycle of a Pod, Pod Scaling, Taints & Tolerants, Services, Deployments, Replication Controller, Cordoning, Helm etc.
This exams also covers the basics of a lot of tools that are used in the Kubernetes Ecosystem. Eg. Istio, Jaeger, Zipkin, Knative, CRIO, Flux, JenkinsX. You need to know the purpose of these tools and when they should be used. Few questions will be on how CNCF works, their working groups (TAG, SIG), KEP, CNI implementations (Flannel), CSI Implementations (Rook), SMI implementation – Istio etc.
The Linux Foundation exams are on the costlier side. I would recommend to watch/subscribe to their emails and wait till you get offers upto 35 to 40% for the exams. The exams also give one free re-attempt if you could not get a passing score in your first attempt.
Kubernetes:
I personally underestimated the power of Kubernetes. I assumed it helps to run two or more containers at a time. It does more with its extensible plugin architecture. Static Pods Vs Dynamic Pods, How etcd is stored, how k8s support stateful applications like databases, the role of high level and low level container runtimes, autoscaling, load balancing, cloud control manager, schedulers are some of the concepts you will enjoy as an architect, developer or operations associate.
What Next:
The next level exams (CKAD, CKA, CKS) are more hands-on and I am sure they will be worth giving a try. There is also another associate level exam that focuses on Kubernetes Security – KCSA – Kubernetes and Cloud Native Security Associate. DCA Exam (Docker Certified Associate) could be considered next as well.