Certified Kubernetes Administrator – CKA

soulTec has something to celebrate. Three of our engineers passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam and hold the certification. Here is why we are celebrating that, and how our engineers got there.

Containers are everywhere

The word container has settled into IT the way “VM” once did. There is no getting round it any more.

soulTec’s engineers have specialised in virtualisation for years and know their way around virtualising servers, storage and networks. The challenge for them was changing that mindset.

Containers and Kubernetes bring new concepts, new terms, new technology and new approaches, all of which have to be understood. Our engineers want to give our customers the best possible help with the challenges in their IT.

For a lot of Swiss companies the challenge right now is that containers have to be run. Whether it is internal developers programming in new ways, or external software vendors delivering nothing but container images, makes no difference. In the end, IT has to provide a platform on which containers can run. Beyond that, depending on the situation, IT also has to be able to maintain the platform itself, or even help get the container images working.

Why does soulTec need Kubernetes specialists?

soulTec positions itself as the Swiss address for anything to do with VMware. But soulTec is not the only VMware partner in the Swiss market. So how does soulTec set itself apart?

We rely on the knowledge and competence of our people. Part of that is earning VMware’s master services competencies (MSC). Those require both certifications and real customer projects to prove that the technical skills and the ability to deliver projects with them are actually there.

For everything around VMware’s Kubernetes products (Tanzu) there is the “Cloud Native” MSC. As mentioned, that takes several certifications and successful projects. One of the required certifications is the CKA, which is unusual in that VMware does not only ask for its own VCP (VMware Certified Professional) certifications but, in this case, for an external certification from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

So soulTec as a company has an interest in having its own CKA-certified engineers, in order to earn that MSC.

What drives our engineers?

Our three engineers on this were Dario, Ümit and Raphael. We asked them what personally motivated them to learn this technology.

**Dario
**My career after training began as a VMware and Linux administrator. I learned a lot about the bash shell there and enjoyed administering servers from the console. The same with VMware: with PowerCLI I always found the command line attractive for getting things done quickly and efficiently, or automating them.

In Kubernetes everything happens on the command line. That, combined with the pleasure of learning something new, was my strongest personal motivation for taking this exam. Until then we had had little to do with Kubernetes in our day-to-day work, but many technologies have automated Kubernetes (VMware Tanzu) or been built on it. The exam gave me the motivation to understand better what the technology looks like and how our customers actually benefit from something like VMware Tanzu.

**Ümit
**Automation has always played a part in my working life as an IT professional, whether in backup, networking, servers or clients. The last of those in particular was an important part of my career. I worked as a client/server engineer for a long time and got to know various mechanisms for provisioning a client or a server automatically.

Much of that happened in various command line interfaces. Over time, though, my work shifted towards virtualisation, and increasingly towards less technical tasks such as project management. At the moment the balance is back, and one reason for that is certainly the automation team we built at soulTec. Here we find a lot of technical ways to make life easier for a company’s IT department, and Kubernetes is at the front of that.

What I find interesting is the concept of deploying volatile components, eliminating them when needed and rebuilding them in seconds. That is one reason I decided to go deeper into Kubernetes.

**Raphi
**Where I did my apprenticeship we had a VMware vSphere infrastructure running a lot of Windows-based management systems. The infrastructure reachable over HTTPS from the internet ran entirely on Linux. So I found my way around the Linux world very early, and the pleasure of writing bash shell scripts kept growing. Kubernetes uses that same shell for managing clusters and the rest, only with different commands, so the affinity was definitely there.

How did you prepare for the exam?

Ümit
A year ago the Linux Foundation had an unbeatable Cyber Monday offer: 5 courses and 3 certifications at a heavily reduced price, the “Cloud Engineer Bootcamp” bundle. As a conscientious soulTec engineer I thought it would be a good opportunity to broaden my knowledge and perhaps push other technologies forward in the automation team. When the VMware team asked us to take the CKA exam, I took the course “LFS258: Kubernetes Fundamentals” beforehand.

For understanding Kubernetes better, I found the course revealing. It goes into certain subjects in real detail. Unfortunately I also found that certain subjects are not explained thoroughly enough, which becomes obvious as soon as you do the lab exercises. It is stated clearly, though, that you have to go deeper into the subjects covered in order to pass the exam. That is certainly doable if you work with Kubernetes daily, but at the time there were not many projects for me to work on. And I always find it a bit difficult when you do not experience real scenarios in which to broaden what you know. By the end of the course I was very familiar with the terminology. I definitely understood Kubernetes better, but I did not feel ready for the exam.

After some research on the process and on preparing for the CKA, I kept reading the name Mumshad Mannambeth. He is the co-founder of KodeKloud.com. KodeKloud set out to teach its students well-known and current DevOps technologies as simply as possible, often with the focus on getting certified in a particular technology. Because I could take advantage of good offers on Udemy, and KodeKloud’s courses are offered through Udemy too, I decided to buy Mumshad’s course. “Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests” was well structured, and the theory and the practical elements were well balanced. The point of the course was clearly to pass the CKA. I could recommend it, and that is how my colleague Raphael came across it and booked it too.

Another very useful tip came from a good friend who works at the competition, killer.sh. He told me that all his colleagues who earned the CKA had practised with killer.sh. I thought: if a whole Kubernetes team relies on it, using killer.sh cannot be wrong. So I bought two CKA attempts with killer.sh. An attempt is active for 36 hours, and during that time you can use the exam simulation as much as you like.

That tip is one I can only pass on. The three of us, Dario, Raphael and I, even practised a run together once and found we were doing pretty well with our answers. Once you feel comfortable after the first attempts with killer.sh, that is a good moment to register for the exam, which is what I did. killer.sh is known to be harder than the actual exam. There is now a free killer.sh trial included when you book the certification with the Linux Foundation. I saved the last attempt and did it again the day before the exam.

Raphi
I started with the video course “Techworld With Nana – The Ultimate Kubernetes Administrator Course”. Nana knows a lot about Kubernetes and conveys it excellently. In those videos she always covers the theory first and then shows how to put it into practice. I followed the command lines one to one and ended up with a working, manually built Kubernetes cluster.

With the basics in hand it was time to turn it all into practical exercise. That worked well with the excellent course “Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests”, taught by Mumshad Mannambeth. Mumshad explains each subject well and in detail. Every subject then has a practice test on KodeKloud.com, on a preinstalled Kubernetes cluster reachable directly in the browser, also built by Mumshad and shaped exactly around the current chapter.

After the course I did the CKA practice exams, also provided by Mumshad. Those, along with the ones on killer.sh, took my Kubernetes knowledge to the next level and got me through the CKA.

Deadlines, whether in projects or exams, are definitely always a motivator. For me that motivation showed, because at the start I did not even know the difference between a pod and a container. So now I am proud to hold the CKA.

Dario
Preparing for this exam reminded me once again that I learn very well by reading. That, combined with practical exercises to see it all in action, was the perfect way for me to learn.

My companion and study guide was the book “Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Study Guide” by Benjamin Muschko. I read it through once and only had to look things up once or twice to understand a subject. Every chapter ends with practical exercises, and you can look at the solution to check whether you got it right.

As a technical aid, Vagrant was an enormous help. With it, setting up a small Kubernetes cluster to practise on took no time. When something broke, it was simply rebuilt. Some of the exercises in the book above are built on a Vagrant environment the author provides through GitHub. Using that tool while learning is an absolute recommendation. You can download my playground cluster from my GitHub: one control plane VM with 3 worker nodes.

How did exam day go?

Raphi
It is 9:00, and the exam starts at 9:30.

Like a model student I click “start exam” in my home office 30 minutes early. Software downloads and takes over the whole screen, it checks whether illegal applications are running in the background, and a proctor joins who does nothing for two hours but watch.

At 09:35 the checks were finally over: the physical environment inspected by webcam, applications uninstalled because they were “illegal”, the smartphone visibly put away. So I could finally start.

The downloaded software also displays the Kubernetes environment and the tasks. I decided to run the tasks on the left third of my 50-inch monitor and the Kubernetes environment on the rest.

As if the stress of an exam in a setup like this, with those pre-checks, were not enough, I was nearly disqualified because I had supposedly “kept looking away”. The proctor would not accept that I have a relatively large monitor and therefore have to turn my head to read the tasks properly. Turning my head then became a rather uncomfortable squint, because I already had two warnings out of a maximum of three.

**Ümit
**I picked a slot in the middle of the lunch period, because that suited me best. Before logging in to the exam platform I cleared everything off the desk, checked that no documents were lying around and that I could move the webcam freely, remembered to find a glass bottle for water, because a water bottle with a label is not allowed, put it on the desk, and finally checked that the door was locked so nobody could walk in. I logged in 30 minutes before the exam and started the system checks. Those turned out to be somewhat tedious: it checks the running services and applications on the computer, and if one of them is not accepted by the exam platform, presumably because of the risk of cheating or of the exam being recorded, that service or application has to be stopped. Not every service can simply be stopped, because of dependencies or because the system forces it to start. I was glad I had logged in early. There were a lot of services to stop.

At the start of the exam there are a few instructions from the proctor that you have to follow for it to run smoothly. There was some minor friction with the proctor about my resolution, but I got through it. I have to say I sweated a bit during the exam, though not because of the exam itself: the temperature in the room was rather high. Because I did not fancy a discussion and would rather deal with the questions, I decided against asking the proctor whether opening the windows was acceptable and carried on. A small tip from me: look at all the exam questions and do not try to work through everything in order. Some tasks refer to earlier ones, but you are told when they do. I could not answer every question or solve every task before the time ran out. So I had a bad feeling about the result and could only wait. But I was not hard on myself, because I was the first of the “trio infernale” to sit the exam and could share my experience with my colleagues. I hoped to give them a few good tips so they could prepare a little better.

Dario
Taking the exam comfortably in my home office was tempting at first glance. I had got very used to it over the previous two years and had set up a good office.

I chose a slot at the end of a normal working day. I even went into the proctor environment 30 minutes early to be ready. The exam environment had other ideas. You have to download a special browser and use it for the exam. When you log in, checks run and certain processes are flagged as suspicious.

In my case, on a MacBook, those were some system processes that could not be switched off manually. So it came down to killing them by hand in Activity Monitor, the macOS task manager, and then rerunning the check quickly before the system restarted them. That alone took several minutes.

The proctor then messages you with requests like “show me the room”. With my webcam fixed to the monitor, that turned out to be somewhat difficult. Checking my ID, my proctor eventually complained that my webcam quality was not good enough to verify the document, and I was asked to find another solution. On a $400 exam, I found that a little irritating.

The whole process from the beginning, but this time directly on the MacBook without keyboard and mouse. And after another 20 minutes of annoying questions from the proctor, I was finally allowed to start.

The exam itself was then easy for me. I could solve every task and had a comfortable 40 minutes left.

Then comes the waiting

Ümit
I had prepared myself mentally and come to terms with having to retake it. I assumed I had not reached the minimum score, because I had not solved certain tasks. Less than 24 hours later the result arrived by email. Opening it, the first thing I could read was “Congratulations!” I was relieved and happy to have passed.

Raphi
After the exam I was unsure, particularly because of all the incidents. The message came exactly 23 hours later by email: I had passed the CKA. Because I was the last of our trio at soulTec to manage it within a month, the whole team was that much happier.

Dario
I knew I must have passed, because I had managed every task. All that was missing was the confirmation, which arrived 24 hours after submitting. Getting the certificate as a small reward for the effort of preparing felt good. For me the road to the exam was the highlight. I very much like learning new things and then applying them straight away.

What now?

With three engineers through the exam, soulTec earned the “Cloud Native” MSC. We are still deeply involved in various VMware Tanzu projects and are glad that more and more customers want to know about the solution.

For us engineers the journey into the container world continues. The next milestone on the agenda is the CKAD certification. And there the focus is entirely on going deeper into the technology, because soulTec as a company does not fundamentally need it.