CKA Exam Strategy: Hands-On Mastery & Killer.sh Rehearsal

1. CKA Exam Curriculum Weighting (2026 Domains)

• Troubleshooting (30%) — Pod exit codes, node NotReady states, Kubelet failure, CoreDNS routing, NetworkPolicy isolation.
• Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration (25%) — Kubeadm cluster bootstrapping, control plane upgrade sequence, etcd snapshot & restore, RBAC role bindings.
• Services & Networking (20%) — Ingress configuration, Service routing, ClusterIP vs NodePort, NetworkPolicy ingress/egress filtering.
• Workloads & Scheduling (15%) — Deployments, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, NodeAffinity, Taints and Tolerations, Resource Requests & Limits.
• Storage (10%) — PersistentVolumes, PVC binding, StorageClasses, hostPath vs CSI volumes.

2. The Essential Exam Terminal Setup (Save First 60 Seconds)

Configure these bash aliases immediately upon connecting to the proctored terminal:

# Fast alias and bash auto-completion
alias k=kubectl
complete -o default -F __start_kubectl k

# Fast dry-run output helpers
export do="--dry-run=client -o yaml"
export now="--grace-period=0 --force"

# Verify vim tabulation settings (~/.vimrc)
cat <<EOF > ~/.vimrc
set tabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
set expandtab
EOF

3. The High-Value Etcd Backup & Restore Drill

You are guaranteed an etcd snapshot or restore question. Memorize the exact TLS flag syntax:

# 1. Take snapshot
ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl --endpoints=https://127.0.0.1:2379 \
  --cacert=/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt \
  --cert=/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.crt \
  --key=/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.key \
  snapshot save /tmp/etcd-backup.db

# 2. Verify snapshot
ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl snapshot status /tmp/etcd-backup.db

# 3. Restore to new data directory
ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl --data-dir=/var/lib/etcd-restore \
  snapshot restore /tmp/etcd-backup.db

# 4. Point static pod /etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd.yaml to /var/lib/etcd-restore