CKS v1.22.0 in 25 hours
Are you looking for last minute preparation and have at least 2 years of experience with Kubernetes? Is the deadline to the CKS exam is so very near and you want a good passing score. This is almost all the info that you will need along with some learnings which I had while attempting the exam.
Before going further there are some useful links about CNCF k8s exam curriculum and some tips/tricks which I have already mentioned in my previous blog of CKA/CKAD in 15 days which can help you save the time for the exam with effective and sharp preparation.
Before starting the Exam
Typical information about CKS exam
Prerequisite — A active CKA certification
Exam Syllabus
Exam Resources
NDA according to this, number of questions in the exam shouldn’t be disclosed which others do.
Exam Environment Demo Please watch it at least once.
CKS Certification is valid for 2 years
CKS Passing Score with 67 or above
Keep your bookmarks saved in at least 2 browsers, so that in case a single browser fails you can go ahead and launch the exam in another browser.
Restart your laptop and clear the cache of all times of both the browsers. Disable any extensions like any adblockers if enabled previously. If its a windows OS halt the windows update service as well.
Read all the questions carefully, for every question you will be getting a skeleton template which can be used to complete the questions quickly however it totally depends on the type of the template. Its your choice to use them and is not mandatory.
Effective Preparation
For me I took the exam within 5 days and allocating 5 hours/day and passed in first attempt.
Day 1
Signed up for Kodekloud subscription.
Started CKS course.
Day 2–3–4
CKS course is roughly 8 hours, finished watching the course.
Created last-minute notes from the labs in-between the course.
Day 5
Completed at least 2 Mock exams till evening.
Gave killer.sh which comes free with CKS once.
Verified my answers from the solution for both the test platforms.
There are multiple platforms to learn, but I passed my CKA/CKAD and now CKS solely from my past experience and from Mumshad Mannambeth’s CKS course on Kodekloud. Kodekloud CKS mock exams are pretty easy and killer.sh is something that is required before you actually appear for the exam atleast of CKS along with hands-on experience in linux, containers and orchestration.
Bookmarks to do in Kubernetes documentation
This is a suggested listed according to my preparation and not exhaustive.
Kubectl Cheatsheet (Micro)
Kubectl Cheatsheet (Macro)
Secure Service Account
Ingress for a pod (ingress+pod)
Access type Network policy with deployment (declare network policy)
Full Network Policy — use this as a benchmark template
ClusterRole/Role, ClusterRoleBinding/RoleBinding (use kubectl imperative commands)
Seccomp Profile on a Pod
Trivy Severity Filter Image InSpec
Falco Rules Configuration API Server
Admission Controls 1 2 3
Auditing in Kubernetes 1 2
Secrets in Kubernetes
Container RunTime
Pod Security Policy
Multipage Kubernetes Documentation
Custom Columns
A snippet of bookmarks which I had prepared prior to the exam
With that being shared this is the exhaustive list of the Kubernetes documentation which might be useful and will save time while attempting the exam, the exam syllabus and curriculum is quite vast and ever changing.
Effective Info
While attempting anything related to kube-api-server make sure the cluster is in healthy state after you complete the question. If its unhealthy, make sure to bring the cluster to the previous state and re-attempt but don’t leave the cluster unhealthy.
Have an understanding of checking the container logs, and how to check and read through them.
Regarding AppArmor please make sure you know the following commands aa-genprof, apparmor_parser, aa-enforce and aa-status and there usage. These links lead to external websites which is prohibited in the real exam.
Alias
alias kdo=’kubectl get — dry-run -oyaml’
alias ka=’kubectl apply -f’
AppArmor Profile Location
/etc/apparmor.d/
SecComp Profile Location
/var/lib/kubelet/seccomp/profiles/
Get the Image used in by a pod (jq/jsonpath)
kubectl get pods pod-name -o json | jq -r ‘.spec.containers[].image’
kubectl get pods pod-name -o jsonpath=’{.spec.containers[].image}’
Effective searching for a string in a file
cat file-name.txt | grep -A 10 -B 20 -i “string”
A — 10 lines above from the matching string in line
B — 20 lines below from the matching string in line
i — case insensitive search
w — match only whole words
It would be a very bad day if something like below happens with you, I had a pretty bad one myself so I know this is gonna be very useful if you read through it and have an understanding on what should be done just in case.
I am unable to connect with the exam window
After all the basic requirements are met with the exam monitor/proctor, you will need to click on START EXAM button to begin the exam. If it misbehaves or doesn’t work, inform the proctor immediately and sort this out. Don’t panic as it has been happening with CKS exams recently, your timer hasn’t yet started, for me it took like 40–45 minutes to sort it out.
I was using Chrome which didn’t work for me and had to change the browser to edge but I didn’t had k8s bookmarks saved on it.
I am unable to type in the terminal
This can be a major setback, while performing the exam if you are unable to interact with the terminal, give it a minute or two, then without wasting anytime, in the exam UI search for refresh exam window and click on it, if it doesn’t fix, follow up with the reset console option which fixed it for me. Other exam user interface details.
What do they do?
Refresh Exam Window: use to refresh the Linux Server Terminal without reloading the entire web page. If this doesn’t fix then reset the console
Reset Console: use to reset the HTML terminal application and to flush all firewall settings on the candidate’s server.
It happened for me when I was at 7th question and I wasted my 30–45 minutes figuring this out whether to click or not or will it reset my previous exam progress because for me the exam monitor went away, it seemed like the other person just vanished, he came back once I figured it out and was already attempting other questions and apologized but that time had already gone away and lost. Due to this I completed my exam in 1.5 hours and missed to answer the last question as well.
Communication Channels
In case of your exam is expiring and you are unable to book a slot or there is some other info, you can raise the queries on the following channels :
https://training.linuxfoundation.org/about/contact-us/
examsupport@innovativexams.com
1–888–504–9178
examsupport@psionline.com
Finishing Note
Being a procrastinator I had very little time for preparation and therefore this is the most aggressive plan I came up with no time to give a re-attempt. Please plan before and have enough time so that you can re-attempt the exam in case you fail to pass in the first time. At the time of writing the CKS exam is based on v1.22.0 which will soon be moved to v1.23.0, PodSecurityPolicy is deprecated and with v1.25+ you might see something more, so be prepared for that.
Thanks for reading and Good Luck with the aggressive Practice.
For further queries you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I hope you don’t have any queries as everything is answered here itself.
