How I scored 95% on the CKAD
What I'd tell my past self about the Kubernetes Application Developer exam time management, the topics that actually matter, and the non-technical gotchas nobody mentions.
I sat the CKAD last month and scored 95%, finishing in 115 minutes with 5 minutes to spare for verification. Here's what I'd tell myself if I were starting prep again.
How the exam works
You get somewhere around 17–20 questions and 120 minutes to solve them. Do the math and that's roughly 7 minutes per question and that 7 minutes has to cover reading, solving, and verifying.
The trap is treating those 7 minutes as solve time. Verification is where points get saved, especially on Deployments where a typo in a label selector silently produces zero pods.
The non-technical stuff nobody warns you about
The actual exam content is only half the battle. The other half is the testing environment, and these are the things that nearly tripped me up:
| Issue | What to do |
|---|---|
| Bad weather | Check the forecast for your exam day |
| Unstable wifi | Keep a mobile hotspot ready (~2 GB free) |
| Sweating from over-lighting | Sort out ventilation before you start |
| PSI browser update mid-checkin | Start the check-in process 30 minutes early |
The exam itself only pulls about 0.9 GB of data, but I'd keep 2 GB available in case your backup connection has to carry the whole session.
The topics that actually matter
Based on the published curriculum, the topics worth drilling until they're muscle memory:
Ingress, Canary deployment, Service Account, Cron Job, RBAC, Network Policy, Deployment, Docker/Podman, Services, Pods, ConfigMap, Secrets, Readiness, Liveness, Resources (requests and limits), SecurityContext, ResourceQuota, and LimitRange.
If you can do all of these imperatively without reaching for the docs, you've already won most of the time pressure.
What's not in the curriculum
Helm, CRDs, and Kustomize aren't part of the published CKAD curriculum. Don't waste prep time on them for this exam save them for CKA or real work.
Two tips that mattered most
1. Don't rely only on Killer.sh or KodeKloud. They're great, but the actual exam wording is different. Focus on core concepts (Deploy, SVC, Ingress, NetPol, RBAC, Secrets) and every imperative command variant you can think of.
2. Always and I mean always verify your work. Especially Deployments.
Get comfortable with kubectl rollout:
kubectl rollout status deployment/<name>
kubectl rollout history deployment/<name>
kubectl rollout undo deployment/<name>
The 5 minutes I spent at the end checking my answers caught two questions I'd half-finished and moved on from.
What I learned
- Time budgeting beats raw speed. 7 minutes per question, used deliberately, is plenty.
- The environment is part of the exam. Wifi, lighting, and the PSI check-in can eat 30 minutes if you let them.
- Imperative commands save the test. Anything you have to write declaratively from scratch costs you time you don't have.
- Use multiple terminals. I used two terminals one to edit a resource and second to check labels or logs for the same question.
- Use kubectl config set-context Instead of passing the namespace everytime set the current namespace using kubectl config command.