Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate (CNPA)
Validate expertise in building, operating, and scaling internal developer platforms (IDPs), platform engineering principles, developer self-service workflows, platform APIs with Crossplane, and golden path architectures.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The CNPA validates foundational and practical expertise in platform engineering principles, treating the platform as a product, building Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), developer self-service, and cloud-native composition tooling.
The CNPA is a 90-minute multiple-choice examination consisting of 60 questions administered online with remote proctoring.
A passing scaled score of 75% is required. Results are displayed immediately upon submission.
Domains include: (1) Platform Engineering Fundamentals (20%), (2) Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) (25%), (3) Cloud Native Composition & Abstraction (25%), (4) Developer Experience (DevEx) & Self-Service (15%), and (5) Platform Operations, Security & Governance (15%).
Platform engineering designs and builds toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations. Treating the platform as a product means conducting user research, defining roadmaps, and prioritizing developer satisfaction.
Cognitive load refers to the mental effort required to complete tasks. Platform engineering reduces cognitive load by abstracting complex cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes manifests, and security plumbing into intuitive self-service interfaces.
Golden Paths are opinionated, supported, and automated templates and workflows that guide developers along the easiest, most secure, and compliant route to deploy and operate applications in production.
Crossplane extends Kubernetes with Composite Resource Definitions (XRDs) and Compositions, allowing platform teams to define custom self-service APIs (e.g. CompositePostgreSQL) that provision multi-cloud resources via Kubernetes CRDs.
The portal serves as the front-end pane of glass for the IDP, providing a service catalog, software scaffolding, technical documentation, and observability dashboards.
Kratix is a framework that allows platform teams to deliver 'Promises' (co-locating custom APIs with pipeline workflows) that provision infrastructure across multiple target clusters.
DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, Time to Restore Service) combined with SPACE framework dimensions (Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, Efficiency).
Platform engineers, cloud architects, DevOps practitioners, SREs, technical product managers, and engineering leaders building enterprise self-service infrastructure platforms.