TLDR; Have some fundamental webdev knowledge and understanding, some devops experience, buy the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Essentials (LFS250) course, do mock exams
Contents
Story Time
I am studying cybersecurity in university and I am interested in pursuing more blue team roles especially in cloud and devops / devsecops. Anyone doing devops would know what Kubernetes is. Based on my limited understanding, its basically the end stage of a CICD pipeline. Your cloud native microservices architecture application with hundreds of containers would be managed (orchestrated) by Kubernetes. If your web application is not at this scale, Docker compose would probably suffice.
Whenever I explain Kubernetes to friends who aren't in IT, I would tell them this. Imagine yourwebsite.com runs in a single box. It can only fit a limited number of visitors before the box is full. So what if you can run yourwebsite.com in 2 boxes? This way you can have more visitors. This is what Kubernetes does. Creates more resources for your website when it needs. Then at the same time, what happens when your 2 box website has low traffic and uses 1 box only? Kubernetes automatically brings down the extra box. This is a huge oversimplification of all the features Kubernetes has but I believe it describes the gist of Kubernetes.
While learning about the different stages of a CICD pipeline, I learnt Kubernetes by poking around with minikube. I was glad to see that it was similar to Docker compose. But once I pulled up the Minikube dashboard, I was bombarded with so much jargon and information. Hmmm instead of diving head first into K8s, I decided to do more research first.
That's where I discovered K8SUG. Apparently there's a meetup group in Singapore (where I live) for K8s. And they have been organising these meetups every month, for a few years already. I found this very interesting because I don't see special interest groups for say metasploit. Why would a certain software have a community that meets up every month? Quite bizzare to me still hahaha. You can ask me more about the meet ups. I mention K8SUG because it was here that I was introduced to Yong Kang. I haven't met him in person but in the K8SUG telegram group, he regularly posts promo codes for the K8 certifications. They are substantial discounts of 40 - 50%.
Damn it's almost as if god was telling me to learn K8 hahaha. So of course, I jumped at the opportunity and paid for the most entry level K8 cert - KCNA. All MCQ made it more attractive too lol. I bought the bundle that includes the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Essentials (LFS250) course as well. This course together with Introduction to Kubernetes (LFS158) course helped me understand K8 architecture much better. I studied the materials like how I studied my modules in school. Alongside, I poked around hosting Gitlab in my local minikube. Typing in commands myself helped but what I found most helpful was being able to cross refer what I was learning, to the Minikube dashboard showing me the data from my Gitlab app
For instance, initially I was a bit confused between ingress and NetworkPolicy. I thought they were the same thing. But being able to see their individual tabs in the minikube dashboard, and being able to explore what objects were under what objects, helped me understand better. Minikube dashboard picuted below.
BTW, self hosted Gitlab on kubernetes is very simple with Helm. I referred to here and here.
So, studying course materials, poking around with minikube, and now the final and probably most crucial bit - doing mock exams aka exam dumps
Exam Dumps
From best to okay
dump 1
dump 2
dump 3
dump 4
dump 5
Some of these require account registration.
There's surely more sources out there, but these are the best ones I found. Some of the questions did appear in my actual KCNA attempt. And of course, the actual KCNA questions had many questions I had not seen before.
In this era of generative AI, I consulted Mr Chatgpt for help too.
The Exam
KCNA includes 1 retake. So essentially you have 2 tries to pass. The passing score is 75%. I studied for about 2 weeks and decided to give it a shot. A bit of an impulse decision, but I treated my first attempt as a gauge to see how the exam would be like. Unfortunately I couldn't pass on my first try, but that's okay. I was relieved to see that the questions weren't crazy difficult, in fact some questions were similar to the ones found in the exam dumps.
What I wasn't expecting however, was how long it takes for the online proctor to check my room. KCNA is an online proctored exam. The proctor will check your room to ensure you're not cheating. You'll also need to have a camera and mic to stream yourself taking the exam. I used my Fujifilm camera and plugged in my mic to my camera. Normally when I do video calls, I would connect my camera and mic to OBS (open broadcasting software). It took me a while to realise it wouldn't work with the lockdown broswer. I had to use my camera with my mic plugged into it, as the direct source. The lockdown browser is quite iffy ... if you book your exam at 5pm, you can connect at 4:30pm to set up everything. Even if the set up over runs 5pm, you still will have the 90mins for the exam.
And just like that... after about 3 - 4 weeks of studying, I passed the exam, and am officially certified as a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate :)
let's connect on linkedin!
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