What’s new about CKAD ?

Disclaimer: This blog post is only intended to cover my personal thoughts on CKAD, its new exam format experiences, my learning process and what to watch our for in the new exam format.

Who should do CKAD ?

The Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) can design, build and deploy cloud-native applications for Kubernetes.
The exam assumes working knowledge of container runtimes and microservice architecture.

The successful candidate will be comfortable:
1. working with (OCI-compliant) container images
2. applying Cloud Native application concepts and architectures
3. working with and validating Kubernetes resource definitions

What are the positives of this new exam format ?

1. I felt confident after clearing the results as I have not used the documentation pages extensively like we do in the old format
2. The questions were thoughtful and few made me really think, rest all were to the point.
3. The exam format is strictly confined to the PSI exam terminal and we are not allowed to open any other tabs in your browser (like in the old format).
4. The curriculum stays updated with few overlapping topics from CKA.

What are the issues I faced in this new format ?

1. The zoomed-in documentation page made the search for templates difficult, I couldn’t scroll to the right and also searching using CTRL+F and going to the corresponding templates were near to impossible.
2. You may face intermittent issues in the remote desktop connections and some time while you copy paste the templates outside the terminal.

What you can do to overcome the potential problems ?

1. If you are someone who extensively use Kubernetes documentation for even the simple resource definitions, I would suggest you to change and practice a lot before your exam day.
2. If you face issue in copy-paste, don’t waste time . close your terminal emulator (your linux box) and then open it again. I wasted few mins thinking why it wasn’t working.
3. Be profound in usage of docker and kubernetes imperative commands. This will help you to use less documentations.
4. Be clear on the concepts of Kubernetes object creations and the fields used in the same.

How I studied for CKAD ?

1. Since I had a working experience I didn’t go for any web courses but practiced extensively the CKAD labs from Kode Kloud. You may also utilize Mumshad’s course on Udemy — which thousands are finding it useful.
2. I attempted the killer.sh (CKAD exam simulator) 5 times , which means 10 hours on exam and also 1–2 hours in review altogether. This helped me gain speed and confidence. Good thing is that this is in the new format as well. But I felt the document pages were not the same way as in exam simulator. So be prepared.
3. Before going for exams, I went through docker and Kubernetes cheat sheets and imperative commands. This really helped me to not go back and forth to the documentation pages.
4. Practice well, so that you will be confident on the indentations and you are familiar with the fields and how they need to be declared in a yaml.

CKA or CKAD — which one is easier ?

I would definitely say CKAD was easier compared to CKA. I felt the curriculum of CKA is vast and covered lot of areas and increased the probability of unique questions than CKAD.

If you want to know more about CKA — refer how did I clear CKA in 4 weeks.

Ref Badge URL: CKAD: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer — Credly

Thanks for taking time in reading my blog post, keep learning and gain confidence.

Godspeed