How we passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam

Last year, CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), which helps develop such open source projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus, has a CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) certification program. At the beginning of this summer we decided to participate in it and received the first certificates for our employees. About what it is, why and how it happens, we are happy to tell habras to all curious readers.

Foreword

Over the past years, the Kubernetes project has become truly large, bringing together many interested parties: both vendors, users (system administrators and developers), and third-party enthusiasts. This led to a logical turn in its formation - the need for standardization and certification.

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So programs for partners , standards for K8s distributions and, of course, examinations for specialists began to appear.

In March 2017, the CKA exam program was first published, the repository with which is maintained to this day (it was last updated at the beginning of this year). Its main content is a PDF of the same name:

... from which you can find out which topics are covered by the exam and how these topics are distributed (as a percentage) across the entire task.

On June 15 of the same year, CNCF announced the start of a beta test of the exam. Even then, five of our engineers applied for participation in this event:

... however, for some reason they did not receive any answer ... And we waited for the official start of the exam in order to participate in it already "fully".

Why do we need it?

Quite a popular reaction from many to obtaining any certificates was the question “Why?”:

Without claiming the discovery of America and the universality of our answer to this question, we just fix it here for those who need it:

It is useful to check your knowledge and skills, but in this case the test was prepared by the “most important” organization (CNCF with the support of the parent The Linux Foundation), which gives reason to rely on professionalism and objectivity. (By the way, Kubernetes exams from other companies are already available - for more details, see the end of the article.)
Despite the fact that the availability of certificates does not guarantee any contracts, and many of these formalities and simply indifferent, it is still an additional argument in marketing and on the market, even for those cases where "you already know."
Participation in such initiatives is an obvious help for the Kubernetes project and its associated community.

Training

Immediately I would like to say that passing the exam implies signing an agreement , which includes a confidentiality clause prohibiting disclosure of details about the tasks. Therefore, we are very limited in the story of what specific issues you expect and how to prepare for them ...

However, the already mentioned PDF document contains a rather detailed list of “where to dig”. We have created an internal exam preparation document, which also includes the following links:

detailed (27 p.) manual Candidate Handbook , updated in August of this year and containing comprehensive instructions about the exam and the technique of passing it (how registration is carried out, what tools are available during the exam and what can be done with them, what is the retake policy ...);
Concise (3 pp.) tips on passing the exam - they were updated in July 2018 and tell only about the technique (partially duplicating Handbook fragments): the capabilities of the accessible terminal, the used version of Kubernetes (1.11), general information about clusters waiting for you in tasks etc;
We considered resource catalogs grouped by official themes as the main tool for preparation: one and two ;
Kubernetes The Hard Way ;
simple ways to get a test cluster with Kubernetes: Katacoda and Play with Kubernetes (we already wrote about the latter in a blog) .

In addition, we pay particular attention to the understanding of the following issues:

how to use the built-in kubectl filters;
the entire application deployment cycle without using Helm;
how to diagnose cluster performance

Finally, a number of other publications on this topic can already be found on the English-language Internet. They present [minor] additions - somewhere to the preparation, and somewhere to the exam process itself. For example:

“ How Heptio Engineers Ace the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam ”;
discussion “ CKA Exam advice / tips / tricks? "On reddit;
“ Things to know before taking Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam ”.

One more thing, as if “left behind the scenes”, the requirement for many will be obvious, but still. The only official language for the CKA exam is English . This means that you: a) must read and understand all the technical questions in the assignments, b) must have minimal spoken English in order to understand and follow the oral instructions of the examiner during the session.

How long does preparation take? The answer is predictable: everything is very individual. For illustration, here are some examples:

Our technical director Dmitry Stolyarov ( distol ), who by his nature prefers to prepare very thoroughly for anything, has spent a total of 8 hours.
One of our engineers, who came to our company without the knowledge of Kubernetes and, according to him, “spent on acclimatization to Kubernetes generally six months or a year (?)”, He prepared about 6 hours before the exam itself.
But if it was about people who have practical experience with Kubernetes, there is a downside ... We got a radically different example of a specialist who bought a preparation course for the exam from The Linux Foundation and spent about 4-5 weeks on the network.

By the way, here is this online course - Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258) . It includes materials for 35 hours (they are available within a year after payment) on the following topics:

The cost is 299 USD, and with the CKA exam, 499 USD (a saving of 100 USD is obtained). As a preliminary preparation for this course, the authors mention a free Introduction to Kubernetes (LFS158) , which we wrote about in a blog. However, I remind you that our engineers do not have experience in passing the LFS258 (including in preparation for the CKA).

The final touch: in order for the exam to take place, you need a stable Internet and a working webcam, which is easy to move in any direction, as required by the “supervisor” (Proctor) .

Process

“The creators of the exam managed to achieve a unique state of the examinee: you can only rely on yourself, no outside help. Proctor (a person who is not from the IT sphere at all) does not understand anything of what is happening in the exam, but only carefully looks at your screen and webcam. He even asked me to show the ear canal. ”

- impression of the exam through the eyes of our engineer Andrei Klimentyev ( zuzzas ).

In the above-mentioned agreement for the exam, there are quite strict requirements for the venue and the process itself. In particular, the location should not be public, the room should be private (people other than the candidate are not allowed) and well lit (but without the bright light from the windows / lamps behind the candidate), the desktop should be completely empty (without any devices, papers and etc.). It is forbidden to communicate with anyone, to use third-party devices, notes, notebooks, documentation (except for the official technical documentation of the Kubernetes project) ... The candidate is forbidden to even eat and drink (for this you can request a break):

“I was punished for drinking water. And I did not even think about it, because I really like to hydrogenate myself. ” - zuzzas

And here is another more “frightening” experience with the words distol :

“The most terrible thing for me was the ban to“ cover my face ”. Many people, when they think, do this or that . And I need to warm up the temples / eyebrows, and I do it with one hand - something like this ; only the hand covers the whole face . Accordingly, I made two remarks at the beginning and I spent the whole examination significant efforts to keep my hands on the keyboard. ”

Andrey Polovov ( driusha ) echoes his colleagues:

The most difficult was the expectation of some terrible exam and the very procedure of passing to the western manner, where it is considered shameful to write off. During the exam, I had to receive remarks for seemingly innocuous actions: the habit of mumbling my thoughts under my nose and - the most unpleasant thing for me - looking sideways to warm up the eyes ...

Immediate passing the exam takes 1.5 hours.

Total

Regarding the technical content of the exam, we have the following impressions:

Or from driusha :

“The essence of the exam turned out to be quite feasible for anyone who had real experience with Kubernetes. If this is about you, then your chances are very high. ”

What else our candidates advise to pay attention on the results of the CKA delivery is a good planning / allocation of time for the assignments.

At the end of the exam, the results are determined automatically, but they are not available until they are manually checked. E-mail with the final result comes within 36 hours after delivery.

If you failed to pass the CKA immediately, then the cost of the exam includes one free retake attempt. However, none of our specialists have yet taken it. Successes and you!

Addition

There are several more Kubernetes certification programs. First, the CNCF itself has prepared an exam for developers - Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) . It tests candidates for “the ability to design, create, configure, and publish cloud native applications for Kubernetes,” which implies the skills to identify resources for the application and use basic primitives for subsequent work with them (ie, build, monitor, diagnose ). The cost is 300 USD.

Secondly, exams from other vendors have already appeared:

Kubernetes & Docker KCM100 from Mirantis . At the time of its appearance (December 2016), it was positioned as the world's first certification, formally independent of the supplier. Consists of 30 questions in which the ratio of Docker / Kubernetes is 20 to 80%. The cost is 600 USD.
EX280 from Red Hat , which completely sounds like a Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration. It is easy to guess that the exam questions are not devoted to the upstream-distribution Kubernetes, but to OpenShift (to be more precise, the current version is based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.9). Cost - 450 USD.

But personally, we have not seriously looked at them - at least for the time being.