You can take the test from home. We can use an external monitor with the laptop (which i did) and we need to share both the laptop and the monitor's screen with the proctor. We also need to share the camera so proctor can watch while we take the test. The initial setup with PCI (test taking company) is bit involved and may take 15-20 mins so plan accordingly. In my case i could not write the test first time where the web terminal was unable to connect to Linux Foundation's server. Proctor tried with me for almost 1.5hrs and finally needed to reschedule. The next attempt was smooth but still setting up for the exam does take about 15mins.
At the beginning of each question you are given a command to connect to the right cluster. There were 4 such clusters. For the questions i attempted, only 2 of the 4 clusters were used. Also the questions are grouped together by the cluster you need to connect to in order to minimize the changing between clusters. Also there are parts in the question that can be clicked on and copied and then pasted in the terminal. The terminal is a web terminal so you can see it side-by-side with the question on the same web page. You can have one more tab open for https://kubernetes.io/docs. So it is an open book exam but speed really matters so you need to know what to look in the docs and where to look in it.
Grading of the exam may take up to 36 hrs after which the result of pass/fail is known.
I will update the post once i have the result.
I failed my first attempt - scored 60% and pass score is 66%.
I attempted my re-take today 10/25/20 (Sunday) at 11am CST. This time i realized that each question has a weightage mentioned in percentage. Like some were 2% whereas some were 7%. I also flagged 3 questions to come back to later and moved on. So by the time i was on 19th question i had 32 mins left. I did get sufficient time this way to at least look at all questions. Of the 3 i had marked to return back to later, i only could attempt 1 of them. But they each were 2% weightage so most likely my score wont be impacted by much. Lets see how i fair this time. I will update again tomorrow evening once i receive my result.
An easy to install local single node k8s cluster is microk8s from Ubuntu. I had used this and OLCNE clusters for my practice but microk8s is the easiest option.
Received result for my CKAD exam - i scored not too high (67% only) but still could clear the exam successfully. I plan to write CKA sometime down the line. I think to clear this exam one needs to be quick with typing linux commands. I think 80% or above is a very good score for this exam. But anyway now that i am past it i will rather focus on learning more at this point. Waiting for the Marko Luska's Kubernetes in Action 2nd Edition book to be published and in the meanwhile will be ramping up on other Cloud Native stuff - like service mesh, functions, API gateway, streaming services and monitoring stacks (ELK, Prometheus, Grafana) etc.
Following are the materials i used to prepare:
- https://github.com/bmuschko/ckad-prep - to practice exercises with the below video course.
- https://learning.oreilly.com/learning-paths/learning-path-certified/9781492061021 - Video course by Brian Muschko
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/ - Must practice finding the yaml definitions by searching the docs for various tasks - like creating deployments, services, network policies, etc.
- https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:LinuxFoundationX+LFS158x+2T2019/course/ (Free) - This is required before you do the paid course from CNCF for CKAD.
- Book: Kubernetes Up and Running 2nd Edition by Burns, Beda and Hightower - A more up-to-date book that covers all commands and a quick read compared to the next book.
- Book: Kubernetes in Action by Marko Luska - This is a large book but very readable and said to be one of the best to understand the concepts behind the components of kubernetes.
- CNCF CKAD Training course (Paid) - https://www.cncf.io/certification/training/
- Exercises: https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises - Must do set of exercises.
- CKAD Prep Notes: https://github.com/twajr/ckad-prep-notes
My study notes on CKAD exam prep is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MXGDT3L
