Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

CKAD has been developed by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to help expand the Kubernetes ecosystem through standardized training and certification. This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that consists of a set of performance-based tasks (problems) to be solved in a command line. The K8 Application Developer can design build, configure and expose cloud native applications for Kubernetes. A CKAD can define application resources and use core primitives to build, monitor, and troubleshoot scalable applications & tools in Kubernetes. The exam assumes knowledge of, but does not test for, container runtimes and microservice architecture. The successful candidate will be comfortable using:

• An OCI-Compliant Container Runtime, such as Docker or rkt.
• Cloud Native application concepts and architectures.
• A Programming language, such as Python, Node.js, Go, or Java.

This certification is for Kubernetes engineers, cloud engineers and other IT professionals responsible for building, deploying, and configuring cloud native applications with Kubernetes.
 

There are no pre-requisites for this exam.
 

• Core Concepts 13%

Understand Kubernetes API primitives Create and Configure Basic Pods

• Configuration 18 %

Understand ConfigMaps Understand SecurityContexts Define an application’s resource requirements Create & consume Secrets Understand ServiceAccounts

• Multi-Container Pods 10%

Understand Multi-Container Pod design patterns (e .g. ambassador, adapter, sidecar)

• Observability 18%

Understand LivenessProbes and ReadinessProbes Understand container logging Understand how to monitor applications in Kubernetes Understand debugging in Kubernetes

• Pod Design 20%

Understand how to use Labels, Selectors, and Annotations Understand Deployments and how to perform rolling updates Understand Deployments and how to perform rollbacks Understand Jobs and CronJobs

• Services & Networking 13%

Understand Services Demonstrate basic understanding of NetworkPolicies

• State Persistence 8%

Understand Persistent Volume Claims for storage