My experience with CKA

Did CKA on a Sunday (27/09/2026). Scored 88%. Basically, I made sure that I got the easy ones and struggled with 2 questions about troubleshooting.

• Certificate
• Score
• Credly

Resources I used

CKA course by Mumshad Mannambeth on Udemy

Course

Focused on learning and not performing/memorizing everything.

Wrote the annotation of each class in my words.

I have been working with Kubernetes for about 3 years, so I think this helped to go through the course fast.

Mock 1

Scored ~43% (don’t remember exactly)

I was using k config set-context --current -n $NS and this broke the validation script apparently.

Mock 2

Score ~86%

Learned that review is very important, made a lot of small errors:

• Right thing in wrong namespace.
• Wrong resource name.

Mock 3

Got 100%. Reviewed everything.

Free killer.sh mocks

Scores:

• CKA-A: 70/74
• CKA-B: 76/93

Most of the questions here were more difficult than the easy ones in the exam. So, I think you can do the easy ones comfortably if you got a good score in these.

The CKA-A gave me a lot of confidence to schedule the exam in the same week.

Did the CKA-B 2 days before and relaxed the day before the exam.

Biggest mistake I made

I had a troubleshooting question about the kube-apiserver using the wrong IP of etcd. Fixed that, but after a while the kube-scheduler wasn’t starting. Searching later, I found out that this was probably because of a high resource request usage by the kube-apiserver static pod. Very sneaky.

The other question was about installing the CNI that had support for NetworkPolicies. I installed calico with no problem. However, when I came back to review the question, the kube-controller-manager was not stable for some reason.

I think this is what got me in the exam. There is no review post-exam, so I can only suppose.

What I felt that I did right

• Skipped the ones that I knew were harder or time-consuming.

• Reviewed the questions to make sure I got the easy ones right.

• Was not afraid to schedule the exam early. The content was fresh in my mind and I was able to push myself a little bit to finish every mock before.

• Reviewed my notes the day before.

• Slept well the day before.

• Warned everybody in my house about the exam.

• Used the whole 2h available. Yes, it hurts a little bit.

• Did the exam on Windows.

  You can do it on Ubuntu, but people had fewer problems on Windows.

  Since this was my first experience with PSI, I felt the fear and was not willing to gamble that high. It’s an expensive certification and I value my time.

  Maybe I will try using Ubuntu in future exams. Having Windows dual-booted is sad.

Next steps

I will start to prepare for CKS 💀