Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)
Demonstrate foundational, entry-level understanding of Kubernetes and the broader cloud-native ecosystem, including CNCF projects, container orchestration, cloud-native architecture, observability, and GitOps workflows.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The KCNA is a pre-professional, entry-level certification that validates foundational knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, cloud-native architecture, and CNCF landscape projects.
The KCNA is a 90-minute multiple-choice examination consisting of 60 questions administered online with remote proctoring.
The passing scaled score is 75%. Candidates receive immediate scoring results upon submission.
Domains include: (1) Kubernetes Fundamentals (46%), (2) Container Orchestration (22%), (3) Cloud Native Architecture (16%), (4) Cloud Native Observability (8%), and (5) Cloud Native Application Delivery (8%).
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Landscape is a curated categorization of open-source projects spanning container runtimes, orchestration, storage, networking, service meshes, observability, and CI/CD.
Projects progress through three maturity tiers: Sandbox (early-stage innovation), Incubating (stable with multiple production adopters), and Graduated (thriving ecosystem, robust governance, highest maturity).
A Virtual Machine virtualizes hardware and runs a full guest operating system. A Container virtualizes the OS kernel, sharing the host kernel for lightweight, fast execution.
Cloud-native architecture leverages microservices, declarative APIs, containers, dynamic management, and automated GitOps pipelines to build resilient, manageable, and observable systems.
A service mesh (e.g. Istio, Linkerd) is a dedicated infrastructure layer that provides transparent service-to-service communication, security (mTLS), traffic routing, and observability without altering application code.
Metrics (numeric time-series data, e.g. Prometheus), Logs (timestamped event records, e.g. Fluentd/Grafana Loki), and Traces (end-to-end request lifecycle across distributed systems, e.g. OpenTelemetry/Jaeger).
GitOps is an operational framework where declarative infrastructure and application states are version-controlled in Git, and automated controllers (e.g. Argo CD, Flux) continuously reconcile live state with Git.
Developers, system administrators, product managers, aspiring DevOps engineers, and students seeking to enter the cloud-native ecosystem before pursuing practical exams like CKA or CKAD.