Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
Validate proficiency in designing, building, configuring, and deploying cloud-native applications on Kubernetes, including multi-container pods, Jobs/CronJobs, readiness/liveness probes, ConfigMaps, Secrets, and blue-green deployments.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The CKAD certification validates that developers can design, build, deploy, configure, and monitor scalable applications on Kubernetes clusters.
The CKAD exam is a 2-hour hands-on command-line test where candidates solve coding and configuration tasks in real-time on live Kubernetes clusters.
Domains include: (1) Application Design and Build (20%), (2) Application Deployment (20%), (3) Application Observability and Maintenance (15%), (4) Application Environment, Configuration and Security (25%), and (5) Services and Networking (20%).
A Liveness Probe determines if a container needs to be restarted when deadlocked. A Readiness Probe determines if a container is ready to accept user network traffic; if it fails, endpoints are removed from services.
Startup probes disable liveness and readiness checks until the application has finished its slow boot process, preventing premature kill loops.
A Job creates pods that run until a specified number of completions successfully terminate. A CronJob schedules Jobs to execute on a recurring schedule defined in Unix cron format.
Init containers run to completion sequentially before any app containers start. If an init container fails, the pod restarts by default, ensuring prerequisites (like database schema migrations) are satisfied first.
Sidecar (augments or extends main container, like log shippers), Adapter (transforms output to a standard interface, like metrics exporters), and Ambassador (proxies network connections to external services).
RollingUpdate incrementally replaces old pods with new pods, configured with maxSurge (maximum pods created above desired count) and maxUnavailable (maximum pods unavailable during update).
Pod-level SecurityContext applies to all containers in the pod (e.g. fsGroup, runAsUser). Container-level SecurityContext overrides pod settings and enables fine-grained capabilities (e.g. readOnlyRootFilesystem, drop ALL capabilities).
Requests define the guaranteed minimum CPU/memory required for scheduling. Limits define the absolute ceiling; exceeding memory limits results in container termination (OOMKilled).
A passing scaled score of 66% is required. One free retake is provided with exam registration.