Here are the things I did to succeed in the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam:
- Familiarized myself with exam guide and ensured I have covered all the exam topics before taking the exam (https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification/certified-kubernetes-application-developer-ckad/)
- Completed this Udemy course (https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-application-developer/)
- The above Udemy course gives access to KubeKloud labs. The labs are similar to the exam, and completing them helped a lot in succeeding in the exam.
- The Udemy course also provides access to a Slack/Discord channel, and whenever I needed an explanation for a concept, I would post a question there, and there was always someone to respond quickly. Current community links can be found here: https://kodekloud.com/pages/community
- Familiarized myself with Kubernetes documentation. Exam takers are allowed to refer to Kubernetes documentation during the exam.
- Instead of writing YAML manifests from scratch, I copied similar ones from the documentation and modified them based on my use cases. That saved me a lot of time during the exam.
- Whenever I got stuck because I couldn’t remember a command, the Kubernetes command line reference was useful. (https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubectl/kubectl-commands)
Total time to prepare for the exam = one week after I took the CKA exam, most of the exam topics are similar to the CKA exam and I didn’t need to study a lot for the CKAD exam.