KCNA study guide
KCNA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) is CNCF's entry-level, vendor-neutral certification for people who want to prove they understand Kubernetes and the surrounding cloud native ecosystem before moving on to hands-on, role-based credentials. The source describes it as a pre-professional certification with no prerequisites and a beginner experience level, aimed at students, career changers and early-career engineers. The exam is conceptual rather than performance-based: it is an online, proctored, multiple-choice test lasting 90 minutes. Weighting is Kubernetes Fundamentals 44%, Container Orchestration 28%, Cloud Native Application Delivery 16% and Cloud Native Architecture 12%. The KCNA study guide has 4 sections and about 1,206 words.
01Kubernetes Fundamentals
Kubernetes is a declarative system: you submit desired state to the API server, and controllers continuously reconcile actual state toward it. The control plane consists of the kube-apiserver (the only component that talks to etcd and the front door for all clients), etcd (the consistent key-value store holding cluster state), the kube-scheduler (binds unscheduled Pods to Nodes), and the controller-manager (runs reconciliation loops).
307 words, about 2 min02Container Orchestration
Containers package an application and its dependencies, but orchestration supplies scheduling, networking, service discovery, scaling, health management, and reconciliation across many nodes. Kubernetes is the reference orchestrator: you declare a desired state, and controllers recreate failed Pods, reschedule workloads, and roll out changes.
298 words, about 1 min03Cloud Native Application Delivery
Cloud native delivery emphasizes small, immutable artifacts, automated pipelines, declarative deployment configuration, and fast, reversible releases. Build once and promote the same image by digest across environments rather than rebuilding per environment.
297 words, about 1 min04Cloud Native Architecture
Cloud native architecture combines containers, microservices, declarative APIs, immutable infrastructure, and automated operations to build resilient, observable distributed systems. The CNCF landscape organizes projects across orchestration, networking, observability, security, and storage.
304 words, about 2 min