BV BitVistara

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Roadmap

A comprehensive guide to mastering Kubernetes and preparing for the CKA exam.

  1. 1) Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration

    • Manage role based access control (RBAC).
    • Use Kubeadm to install a basic cluster and manage a highly-available cluster.
    • Provision underlying infrastructure to deploy a Kubernetes cluster.
    • Perform a version upgrade on a Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm.
    • Implement etcd backup and restore.

  2. 2) Workloads & Scheduling

    • Understand deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks.
    • Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications.
    • Know how to scale applications and understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments.
    • Understand how resource limits can affect Pod scheduling.
    • Awareness of manifest management and common templating tools.

  3. 3) Services & Networking

    • Understand host network routing on the cluster nodes.
    • Understand connectivity between Pods and Service types (ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer).
    • Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources.
    • Know how to configure and use CoreDNS.
    • Choose an appropriate container network interface plugin.

  4. 4) Storage

    • Understand storage classes, persistent volumes (PV).
    • Understand volume mode, access modes and reclaim policies for volumes.
    • Understand persistent volume claims primitive (PVC).
    • Know how to configure applications with persistent storage.

  5. 5) Troubleshooting

    • Evaluate cluster and node logging.
    • Understand how to monitor applications.
    • Manage container stdout & stderr logs.
    • Troubleshoot application failure and cluster component failure.
    • Troubleshoot networking issues (e.g., DNS, NetworkPolicies).

Practice heavily with `kubectl` imperatively. Speed and accuracy are key to passing the CKA exam!