A four week plan for beginners to crack Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam by Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I have prepared this course based on my own Kubernetes certification that I completed in four weeks.

CKAD is the certification exam from CNCF focusing on Kubernetes application developers. It's a subjective exam so requires you to be comfortable with kubectl commands. You are allowed to refer to official Kuberternes document for yaml and commands. It does not ask you to set up Kubernetes cluster since it's an admin job so you can skip admin related tasks while going through study materials. There is separate CKA exam for administrators.

While preparing for this course, I have kept cost also in mind. There are two suggested Udemy paid courses which together cost me INR 1000/- which I felt it's definitely worth.

There are no prerequisites required apart from software development experience. There is no experience on docker or container required.

Here is weekly suggested schedule you may follow. You may go through some of it faster based on your background knowledge. I have put this schedule based on 2-3 hours daily study. I have advised time split against each week to indicate there should be enough time to do practice and not just going through concepts which won't help in hands on exam like CKAD.

This week focus on building concepts. I found following course on Udemy great to start with.

• Learn DevOps: The Complete Kubernetes Course

You need to cover up to section 3 only and some part of section 4 like ResourceQuota, Namespaces and Networking. You can skip rest.

For this week you should continue to build concept while increasing your practice time. Following course on Udemy provides a good platform for you to practice. After introducing each concept there is a practice link it provides.

• Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) with Tests

It's time now to go full time into hands on exercises. Spend this week doing following exercises.

• CKAD exercises

Make sure you do it yourself and type out the solution before checking the answers given. Now you have gone through the whole CKAD curriculum, concepts and done enough hands-on. You can take following challenge now.

• Kubernetes Challenge

If you did well in challenge, you should feel good to schedule the exam for next week. Please note actual exam is much difficult than this challenge so make sure you make good use of the coming week.

For final revision, I would advise going through following additional free resources.

• Launch A Single Node Cluster
• Deploy Containers Using Kubectl
• Deploy Containers Using YAML
• Deploy Guestbook Web App Example
• Networking Introduction
• Running Stateful Services on Kubernetes
• Liveness and Readiness Healthchecks
• Use Kubernetes To Manage Secrets And Passwords

• Free tutorial on Kubernetes basics

• Introduction to Kubernetes . This is free course referred on official CNCF training page so why not make use of it. Focus on Chapter 8 to Chapter 13.

• Kubernetes Official Documentation. You should take time this week to go through official document since it is available to you during the exam. Familiarity with pages will help you find command or yaml faster during exam.

I would also advise keeping bookmarks for these two pages for command reference.

• kubectl Cheat Sheet
• kubectl Command Reference

With this you should be ready for the exam. All the best!!!