Learning in 2026 with AI - How I Prepared for and Passed KCNA

Samith Perera — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:03:27 +0000

Clearing the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification exam brought me here to write this down. From a 90s kid who spent his school life surrounded by physical books and who started his IT career the same way, nose deep in a manual to using AI-powered resources you can actually have a conversation with, ask questions back and forth, and get answers in real time. That journey, looking back at it now, is something worth capturing.

I used to read my Red Hat books front to back. Then back to front. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. There was something deeply satisfying about sitting with the RHCSA or RHCE material, going through it slowly, letting it sink in at its own pace. I'd finish the last chapter and find myself flipping back to the beginning, picking up things I'd missed the first time around, noticing how concepts connected in ways that only make sense once you've seen the whole picture. That was how I got into IT. Not reluctantly, not as a chore. I genuinely loved it.

The books taught me Linux. I earned both the RHCSA and the RHCE the same way, by living inside the material until it became second nature. That foundation never really left me. Everything that came after containers, AWS, DevOps, Kubernetes, CKA, and the CKAD was built on top of those hours with those books, and I don't take that for granted.

But the world kept moving. PDFs replaced the books somewhere along the way, and I adapted. Then, instructor-led training gave way to self-studying by watching Udemy courses, referring to documentation sites, and a whole constellation of community resources spread across the internet. The tools changed with each era, and I changed with them. Each shift brought something new: portability, video, interactivity, and I kept enjoying the process even as the format evolved.

I just didn't expect the next shift to feel quite as different as it did.

Last month, I decided to go for the KCNA, the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate exam. And before anyone with a CKA or CKAD raises an eyebrow: yes, I know. It's not the hardest exam on the list for someone who has already passed both and worked with Kubernetes for five or six years. If you've been through the practitioner-level certifications, you're walking in with most of what you need. I wasn't doing it for the challenge. I was doing it to complete the cloud native picture, and if I'm honest, because I was curious about something else entirely.

I wanted to see what it felt like to study the way 2026 actually allows you to study. To lean fully into the AI tools available and see whether a proper, thorough study cycle could fit inside a single weekend. Saturday, Sunday, exam on Monday. That was the plan.

I used NotebookLM. Told it my background, what the exam covered, and where my gaps probably were, given that I was coming from a Kubernetes practitioner background rather than a cloud native generalist one. And instead of the usual evening of open tabs and half-read articles, I had a clear, prioritised list of everything worth studying: docs, guides, community resources, all of it. A few minutes. Done.

With the resources loaded into NotebookLM, I asked it to do something specific first: pull out the key theoretical concepts I actually needed to understand. Not a summary. The real substance of the exam structure, the ideas that underpin everything else, the things the exam will probe if you only half know them.

I read through all of it on Saturday morning. It reminded me a little of those early Red Hat days, sitting with a clear body of material, going through it properly, not rushing. The difference was that someone had already done the work of distilling exactly what mattered. I wasn't hunting for the important parts. They were just there. And the difference to those old days, the real one, is that I could actually chat with the material, ask it to pull out specific content, drill into a concept, come at something from a different angle. The book could finally talk back.

Then I put the audio summaries on.

NotebookLM generates narrated walkthroughs of the material, and I listened to them in the background while I moved around the room that Saturday. Not as a replacement for reading, but as a layer on top of it. Hearing the concepts out loud after reading them did something useful: it reinforced the structure in a different part of my brain. By Saturday evening, I hadn't been glued to a screen for hours, but the material had found its way in through two different doors.

It reminded me of reading those Red Hat books twice front to back, then back to front. Same idea, different shape. Let the knowledge settle in from more than one direction.

Sunday was about making it stick.

I went back into NotebookLM and generated flashcards. The ones that make you retrieve something from memory rather than just recognise it on a page. There's a particular feeling you get when a flashcard puts you on the spot, and you realise you can't quite reconstruct the answer, even though you read it yesterday. That feeling is useful. It tells you exactly where to go back.

Then, infographics are visual maps of the concepts that are hard to hold in your head as paragraphs, but click immediately as a picture. The CNCF landscape is a perfect example. You can read about it, but the moment you see how everything sits relative to everything else, it just makes sense in a way it didn't before.

By mid-Sunday, I moved into the quizzes. Easy first, the foundational questions that confirm the vocabulary is solid. Then the medium, where you're applying things rather than just recalling them. Then, hard edge cases, the tradeoffs, the "which of these and why" questions that are genuinely uncomfortable if you've only skimmed the surface. A few of those sent me back to re-read something. That's exactly what they're supposed to do.

And the explain option in NotebookLM is something I have to call out specifically. With a single click, you get a clear explanation of why an answer is right or wrong, and then you can keep going, ask why, ask how, push back, and engage with it like a conversation. That back and forth is what transforms a quiz from a score into an actual learning moment.

By Sunday evening, something had settled. Not the brittle confidence of someone who's memorised enough to get through, probably. Something quieter and more solid, the feeling of actually understanding what you're going to be asked about.

Monday I sat the exam. Passed.

And I found myself thinking about those Red Hat books. About how much I loved reading them twice, about how that thoroughness, that willingness to go cover to cover and then back again, was never really about the books themselves. It was about wanting to know the thing properly.

What struck me is that the weekend I'd just had was driven by the same instinct. The tools were completely different. The experience looked nothing like a Saturday with a book and a highlighter. But underneath it, reading the theoretical foundations carefully, listening to reinforce them, using flashcards to find the gaps, working through quizzes until the hard ones stopped being hard, it was the same approach. Thorough. Layered. From more than one direction.

The decade between those RHCSA days and this KCNA weekend hasn't changed what good learning feels like. It's just given it better tools to work with.

And yeah, that's pretty amazing. Vibe learning is really a thing in 2026.

How to Protect Your Non-Regenerative Documents and Files by auto Syncing them to Google Drive

Samith Perera — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 20:31:41 +0000

In our day-to-day tasks, we use various useful files and documents. While we store code in GitHub or GitLab, we often don’t back up other important files. This poses a risk of losing non-regenerative documents and files in the event of a hardware failure on our laptops, especially if we don’t sync them to any cloud or secondary location.

Google Drive offers a secure solution called Google Drive for Desktop, which provides 15GB of free space. This can help to overcome this challenge by allowing us to back up and sync our files to Google Drive automatically.

What is Google Drive for desktops?

Google Drive for Desktop is an application that lets you access and manage your Google Drive files directly from your computer. It creates a virtual drive on your system where you can view, open, and manage your Google Drive files just like any other file. Any changes you make are automatically synced with your Google Drive, ensuring everything stays up to date across all your devices. This tool is useful for backing up and syncing files between your computer and Google Drive without a web browser.

Use Google Drive for desktop

To easily manage and share content across all your devices and the cloud, use Google’s desktop sync client: Drive for Desktop. With Drive for Desktop, you can find your Drive files and folders on your computer using Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder. If you edit, delete, or move a file in the cloud, the same change occurs on your computer and devices, and vice versa. This ensures your files are always up to date and accessible from any device.

Benefits

You can use Drive for desktop to:

Open files stored on the Cloud directly on your computer.
Find and organize your files in your computer’s file system without using storage space.
Sync folders from your computer to Google Drive.
When you sync, your files download from the cloud and upload from your computer’s hard drive.
After you sync, your computer’s files match those in the cloud.
Your files stay up-to-date and accessible, any change you make applies across devices.
Save files and folders for offline use. This includes files from shared drives.
Collaborate on Microsoft Office files in real time.
If you use Outlook on Windows with a work or school account, send and save files with Microsoft Outlook.
Before proceeding, you’ll need a Google account. You can create one using your work email.

Before proceeding, you’ll need a Google account. You can create one using your work email.

Create a Google account with your work email

Go to https://google.com/accounts/NewAccount in your Web browser.
Fill in First Name and Last Name fields
Click “Use my current email address instead” as indicated below, we will not add personal accounts to Google Accounts.

Type your company’s email address in the “Your current email address:” field.
Type in a password for your Google account. This must be at least eight characters in length and should include a mixture of letters and numbers. Re-enter this password in the “Re-enter password:” field.
Follow the verification process
Click the “I accept. Create my account” button at the bottom of the page to create your Google account with a company email address.
Log in to your company email. Open the email from Google regarding your new account. Click the confirmation link in the email to activate your Google account and complete the process with your company’s email address.
Bingo! You now have a Google account with your work email address.

Install & set up Drive for desktop

Windows

Download Drive for desktop: https://dl.google.com/drive-file-stream/GoogleDriveSetup.exe
Open “GoogleDriveSetup.exe.”
Follow the on-screen instructions.

MAC

Download Drive for desktop: https://dl.google.com/drive-file-stream/GoogleDrive.dmg
Open “GoogleDrive.dmg.”
Follow the on-screen instructions.

Ubuntu

Go to Settings > Online Accounts
Select Google
Signing to Google Account
Follow the on-screen instructions.

Using Drive for Desktop

You will see Drive as a separate folder in your file system, which you can use to store non-regenerative files and documents to keep them protected.

DEV Community: Samith Perera