My thoughts on the Kubernetes Fundamentals course and CKA Exam

01 May 2022 - karit

Recently I completed the Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258) course and Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam from the Linux Foundation.

I am a Penetration Testing and was looking at improving my knowledge of Kubernetes. My goal was to gain the skill to better help review clients’ Kubernetes clusters. In addition, the CKA is a pre-requisite for the Kubernetes Security Essentials (LFS260) and CKS Exam Bundle. CKS is something on my to-do list.

tl;dr

I think LFS258 and CKA is a good course and provides a good foundation. I would recommend the course for pen testers who want to improve their foundation knowledge of Kubernetes.

Course Material

The course material was well put together and had a great balance of video, text and hands-on examples. The course says that there are 35 hours of material and I would say that is about right. Though you will likely need to commit more time to work through the exam simulators.

The initial guided set-up of the Kubernetes cluster, in the course material, I found gave you too many options for how to do it. It is also missing a reboot or service restart after putting a Docker configuration file in place before going onto installing Kubernetes.

Kubernetes has a lot of configuration in YAML, so make sure you have YAML Lint handy. YAML Lint will parse YAML files and often give you better feedback about which line is wrong. The copy and paste from the course material PDF is a bit janky, but most of the things you need to copy and paste are also included in text files in the course materials zip file bundle.

Google Cloud has $150 in credits per email address, so it is the recommended place to run the host operating systems for the Kubernetes cluster.

After signing up you have a year to work through the course material and sit the exam.

Exam Preparation

The course includes access to the killer.sh platform. There is a Sandpit and some example scenarios to work through. Then there are also two exam simulator sessions. The exam simulators give you a timed two hours and then up to 36 hours to go through your answers (it marks the exam for you) and have a go at the questions you did not get to.

The Exam Simulator says it is a bit longer and a bit harder than the actual exam. I would agree with this assessment.

The killer.sh sandpit and exam simulator all run on a web browser (as does the actual exam). I did not observe any lag/latency that affected my use of the tool.

Exam

The exam is a two hour practical exam. It is proctored exam where:

The tricky part is that you can only use the official Kubernetes documentation. It does take some getting used to as the documentation does not always have exactly what you are looking for and you will need to sometimes search for complimentary things. I would recommend that when you are doing the course and the exam simulations you really try to just use the official documentation to get the habit of how best to search and use it.

If you fail the exam on your first attempt, one resit is included in the price. Though the resit still needs to be taken within the year.

Closing thoughts

I feel the course and exam are worth doing for a Penetration Tester who wants to upskill their Kubernetes. That said I found the exam hard as day-to-day I do not review/use Kubernetes that often and I am not building or running clusters. I think the exam would be easier if you were using Kubernetes regularly.

Content

The course was good for teaching the vocabulary required to review and navigate a Kubernetes cluster. I often find the hardest part of learning a new area is the initial learning of the base vocabulary to understand how it works and what you need to search for to find the information you require.

It was an introductory course, the only assumed knowledge I felt was basic Linux command line skills. The course material was organised well and flowed in such a way I did not notice any obvious gaps or jumps without the required background knowledge.

The course is designed for Kubernetes Administrators, not Penetration Testers, so I did not expect it to teach me how to hack a cluster. The course covered what it said it was going to cover.

The length of the course was about right it covered the basics. Being about a work week’s worth of content it is an amount I found I could get through while staying engaged and not feeling overwhelmed with information overload. I generally have a preference for smaller narrower scoped courses that do not end up feeling like a death march of content or burnt out at the end of it.

Value for Money

Value for money I feel the course and exam are well priced at US$575. I feel I got my money’s worth from it. For the price, it was well put together course. I have been on more expensive courses which I feel were less well put together and had less content.

Exam

I do like the two hour length for the exam. It was a good length to test the required skills without going on so long that you feel burnt out at the end of the exam.