CKAD
All the articles in "CKAD".
kubectl commands, minimal YAML, and the kubernetes.io pages to open during the exam, organized by CKAD v1.35 curriculum domain.
Image names, tags, and digests, the imagePullPolicy default rules, private registries and imagePullSecrets, building and pushing images, and Pod spec basics, based on the official docs.
Init containers, native sidecars vs. the classic sidecar approach, the ambassador and adapter patterns, and ephemeral containers, compared against the official docs.
Pod phase, conditions, container states, and restartPolicy first, then what actually happens when a liveness, readiness, or startup probe fails, compared against the official docs.
What Deployment, StatefulSet, DaemonSet, Job, and CronJob each guarantee, and when to pick which, compared against the official docs.
How a Deployment's RollingUpdate and Recreate behave, how maxSurge and maxUnavailable are calculated, the rollout commands, and blue/green and canary deployments built from Service selectors and replica ratios, based on the official docs.
Helm's chart, repository, and release concepts, install/upgrade/rollback/uninstall and values overrides, plus Kustomize's base/overlay, patches, generators, and kubectl apply -k, based on the official docs.
How to create ConfigMaps and Secrets, the three ways to get them into a Pod (env, envFrom, volume), how changes propagate, and projected volumes and the Downward API, based on the official docs.
Requests drive scheduling, limits are enforced at runtime. CPU throttling vs. OOMKill, QoS classes, LimitRange defaults, and namespace-wide ResourceQuotas, based on the official docs.
Notes on how an API request passes through authentication, authorization, and admission, plus ServiceAccounts, RBAC, SecurityContext, and Pod Security Standards, based on the official docs.
Notes on CRDs, custom resources, and Operators that extend the Kubernetes API, and on the rules for deprecating and removing API versions and migrating manifests, based on the official docs.
From why the container filesystem isn't enough to emptyDir, hostPath, configMap volumes, PV/PVC binding, access modes, reclaim policies, StorageClasses, and generic ephemeral volumes, based on the official docs.
Service types and the path from selector to EndpointSlice, Service DNS names, what to check when a connection fails, Ingress rules and pathType, and NetworkPolicy default deny and selector combinations, based on the official docs.
Checking state with kubectl get/describe/events/top, reading logs with kubectl logs, and looking inside containers with exec and debug, based on the official docs.
I passed the CKAD exam I took on October 12, 2026, with a score of 80%. Notes on how I prepared, what the exam felt like, and a write-up of the NetworkPolicy question I couldn't solve.
