CKAD study guide
CKAD · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) is a vendor-neutral credential created by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in collaboration with The Linux Foundation. It certifies that a developer can design, build, configure, and expose cloud-native applications for Kubernetes - defining application resources and using core primitives to build, monitor, and troubleshoot scalable applications and tools. The exam is aimed at application developers with working knowledge of container runtimes and microservice architecture who are comfortable working with OCI-compliant container images, applying cloud-native application concepts and architectures, and working with and validating Kubernetes resource definitions. There are no prerequisites, and the experience level is listed as intermediate. Topics on this exam: Application Design and Build, Application Deployment, Application Observability and Maintenance, Application Environment, Configuration and Security, and Services and Networking. The CKAD study guide has 5 sections and about 1,587 words.
01Application Design and Build
This domain tests whether you can assemble a workload that runs correctly the first time: images, Pod composition, batch workloads, and storage. Know how imagePullPolicy interacts with tags.
322 words, about 2 min02Application Deployment
Deployment mechanics, rollouts, and package tooling dominate this domain. A Deployment owns a ReplicaSet per revision.
332 words, about 2 min03Application Observability and Maintenance
Here you diagnose workloads and keep them healthy after they ship. Three probe types: livenessProbe restarts a wedged container, readinessProbe removes a Pod from Service endpoints, startupProbe suspends the other two until it succeeds.
320 words, about 2 min04Application Environment, Configuration and Security
Configuration injection, resource sizing, and least-privilege identity. Create them with kubectl create configmap app --from-literal=K=V --from-file=./conf or kubectl create secret generic creds --from-literal=token=abc --from-file=./tls.crt .
294 words, about 1 min05Services and Networking
Service wiring, DNS, NetworkPolicy, and Ingress. A Service routes to Pods matching its selector on targetPort .
319 words, about 2 min