CKA Exam Prep 2026

This is for you if

• You know Kubernetes basics and want the CKA without wasting a retake
• You've only practised on kind or managed clusters and kubeadm, etcd or a dead kubelet scares you
• You're slow at the keyboard and run out of time on practice exams
• You're job hunting in DevOps, SRE or platform roles where CKA gets you past the filter

What's inside

• The current exam verified: v1.37 curriculum domains and weights, 15-20 tasks in 2 hours, per-task SSH hosts and allowed docs
• A three-pass time strategy, the seven-minute rule and a ten-second verification habit for every task
• kubectl speed: aliases, imperative commands, --dry-run=client -o yaml, explain, jsonpath and 20 timed reps
• A real kubeadm cluster on Multipass VMs: install at v1.36, upgrade to v1.37, join a second control plane
• etcd backup and restore with etcdctl and etcdutl (the etcd 3.6+ way), certificates and HA quorum explained
• RBAC with a CSR-based user, Helm, Kustomize, CRDs and operators, HPA, native sidecars and scheduling drills
• Services, CoreDNS, NetworkPolicy, Ingress and Gateway API with weighted routing on Envoy Gateway
• A troubleshooting playbook for nodes, the kubelet and broken control plane manifests, with a six-part break-fix lab
• Three timed practice sets of 15 weighted tasks with seed scripts and full solutions, 24 exam-style Q&As, a cheat sheet and a 30-day plan

After this guide you can

• Finish 15-20 CKA tasks in two hours with time left to verify
• Install, upgrade and back up a kubeadm cluster without reading the docs from scratch
• Recover a cluster when kubectl stops answering, using crictl, journalctl and static pod manifests
• Write correct NetworkPolicy, Gateway API, storage and scheduling YAML from an imperative skeleton
• Debug Pending, CrashLoopBackOff, NotReady and empty-endpoint problems methodically
• Walk into the exam knowing exactly how the environment and scoring work

Contents

1. How the CKA actually worksp. 4
2. Strategy, time management and your practice labp. 8
3. kubectl speedp. 13
4. Cluster architecture, installation and configurationp. 19
5. Cluster lifecycle: upgrades, etcd and HAp. 28
6. Workloads and schedulingp. 36
7. Services and networkingp. 45
8. Storagep. 54
9. Troubleshooting playbookp. 58
10. Three timed practice setsp. 63
11. Common mistakes and exam-style questionsp. 80
12. Cheat sheetp. 88
13. 30-day practice planp. 92