The day before yesterday I passed my Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam. With good preparation, the exam is quite feasible and far less difficult than the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, which I passed last year. How did I prepare?

Set up a cluster to practice

It is important to have a cluster to practice with. There are many ways to set up such a cluster. In the following I would like to describe two possibilities: The easiest way to get in touch with Kubernetes is to use Play with Kubernetes. Here you can - for a limited time - generate a cluster and get started right away. You don’t need more than a browser for this. This variant is ideal for a quick start. But it has two basic disadvantages:

  1. The range of functions is understandably reduced, i.e. you may not be able to try out everything necessary for an exam here.
  2. From time to time I had the problem that I could not set up a cluster because there were no more resources available. Then it was time to wait and try again later.

The second option is to build your own cluster. This works very well under Windows with Docker Desktop, which offers a direct way of setting up a local Kubernetes cluster. Here is a description of how it works: https://birthday.play-with-docker.com/kubernetes-docker-desktop/

The content

Now that the cluster exists, the question arises: What do I have to be able to do for the exam? In principle, of course, it is an advantage to be able to move around in the Kubernetes ecosystem and to have understood the concepts. But if you only want to focus explicitly on the exam content, you will find it here. In the end, it was sufficient for me to be able to write down all the exercises presented here quickly and without errors. To do this, I first went through all the exercises and wrote down where I had problems. Then I repeated exactly these exercises again and noted again where I had problems. I repeated this procedure until I no longer had any problems with any of the exercises. In the end, I went through everything again - and nailed the exam.