“Success is counted sweetest… by those who never succeed’ – CKA reminded me that. I had a CKA voucher which was about to expire in 3 months. I started my prep for CKA in June 2025. In fact, I started with LFCS (Linux System Admin), spent some time on DCA (Docker Certified Associate) during May and moved to CKA. I did not give the LFCS and DCA exams, but I have them in my list.
3 Months wasn’t enough for me. It became challenging to manage work, travel and also give time for practicing and preparing for the CKA. I had to rush the topics – especially the new ones added in Feb 2025 (Helm, Kustomize).
CKA exam allows a retry and the passing score is 66. I scheduled the exam a week before the voucher expiry so I could plan my retake if needed.
A Tough Lesson:
- I just managed to get 55 and failed on the first attempt
- Time Management – I managed to get a pass in the couple of practice exams I gave, but I took 3 hours and the exam is just for 2 hours. The same reflected on the exam and I had to hurry towards the last one hour. I made silly mistakes and skipped few complex tasks/steps and didn’t even see the last question.
- Exam Environment – Screen & Font Size – The exam has to be taken from home. It does not allow external monitors and I had to use my laptop screen. The screen resolution was 125% and also the PSI browser by default had bigger fonts on the terminal windows. I struggled to scroll the documentation page, type in the VI editor (deletes took years) and faced frequent remote connection refreshing.
- Not enough practice with ‘kubectl’ commands – Sometimes, I had to look for documentation even to run a testpod with command. Got confused with run/exec, jsonpath etc. It was just making me nervous and I started to loose focus. Every question looked complex.
- Helm & Kustomize – Helm bowled me out at the end and I struggled to find the right commands for installing argocd without crds. The practice exams (KillerKoda) did not cover on Helm or Kustomize.
Practice & Success:
LFCS was so generous and gave me almost 2 weeks time (10 days more than the actual voucher expiry date). I utilized this time to do 7 more practice exams (5 from KodeKloud, 2 from the exam simulator) and also solved 100+ scenarios in killerkoda . With practice, I was more comfortable with kubectl commands almost everything here in this Cheat Sheet. I also gave couple of exams on a single monitor with reduced font size.
VI shortcut ‘daw’ did not help much to delete words. Still had to do multiple key presses.
Took helm tutorial from Rahul Wagh and Abhishek and that was a booster. Tech Tutorials with Piyush was a good gym time companion to refresh kubernetes concepts.
I was able to the complete the second attempt early and had 10 minutes to revisit the complex ones. I timeboxed each tasks and marked 5 for review later. The ingress to gateway migration didn’t work and the broken cluster remained broken. I was able to fix ingress and get a HTTP 200 at the very last minute. After 23 hours, the final score was out and I passed with 70%
Important Tips:
- Time Bound – Don’t spend more than 7 minutes for a task. Target to do the easy ones in the first one hour. You can jump to any question in any order via the drop down.
- SSH Correctly –
- Practice this before hand. Logout of previous session and when you move to a new question, ssh into the new cluster.
- Sometimes you need an extra terminal and make sure you ssh to the correct node.
- Always Test your changes – After you make changes to yaml, test the deployment/pods/services via kubectl commands (but dont spend more time here).
- Pay Attention to hints in the questions –
- Each question will have Quick Reference at the top which can directly take to you to the right topic in the documentation.
- Even github links will be made available – Argo CD Installation
- One of the question was suggesting “Scaling Down to Zero can temporarily helped”. I missed this one and pods got stuck in pending. I realized this later, that it is important when you update the Resources Requests/limits. Rolling Update in this case caused the issue
- sudo is your friend – The practice exam environments will all have sudo access by default. The exam will NOT. Remember to use sudo when making changes to sysctl parameters, check journalctl logs or edit anything in /etc folder. I tried crictl to debug a broken cluster and I got permission denied and it didn’t strike me to use sudo in the last minute. I directly navigated to /var/log/containers and tried to troubleshoot, but it was too late.
- Attempt all questions. Even partial solutions / steps could help in increasing the score – Eg. adding just helm repo, deleting old ingress, creating just a storage class or pv or pvc.
- Breathe kubekctl. The lesser you have to refer the documentation, the more time you will get to troubleshoot or make other complex configurations.
- etcd backup, probes, vpa were not there in the exam. I had a lot of these in the practice exams. Practice helm and kustomize separately.
- Take it easy – When first attempt did not go well, make sure to read and understand the questions. You could get lucky with few questions asked again during the second attempt.