Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

The Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) is the flagship Kubernetes certification, issued by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and administered by the Linux Foundation. It validates your ability to install, configure, secure, and troubleshoot production Kubernetes clusters — the single most-demanded skill in the DevOps and platform-engineering job market today.

This practice test gives you 250 scenario-style multiple-choice questions with detailed, multi-sentence explanations. Questions reference real kubectl commands, YAML manifests, and component behavior so the practice translates directly to the hands-on live exam. The bank follows the latest CKA curriculum and is weighted to match the exam blueprint's domain percentages.

What the CKA exam covers

• Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration (25%) — RBAC (Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, ServiceAccounts), kubeadm installation, cluster upgrades, etcd backup and restore, certificate management, control-plane components (API server, scheduler, controller-manager, etcd), worker-node components (kubelet, kube-proxy, container runtime), HA topology, CRDs and API aggregation.
• Workloads & Scheduling (15%) — Deployments and rolling updates, ReplicaSets, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, Jobs and CronJobs, ConfigMaps and Secrets, resource requests and limits, node affinity / anti-affinity, taints and tolerations, nodeSelector, static pods, priority classes, HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA), init containers.
• Services & Networking (20%) — pod networking and CNI, Service types (ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, ExternalName), kube-proxy modes (iptables, IPVS), Endpoints and EndpointSlices, Ingress controllers and Ingress resources, NetworkPolicies, CoreDNS, headless services, and the modern Gateway API.
• Storage (10%) — PersistentVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses and dynamic provisioning, access modes (RWO, RWX, ROX, RWOP), reclaim policies (Retain, Delete, Recycle), volume types (emptyDir, hostPath, configMap, secret, NFS, CSI), volume snapshots, and the CSI driver model.
• Troubleshooting (30% — largest domain) — diagnosing pod failures (CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, Pending, ContainerCreating), application and service-connectivity issues, DNS troubleshooting, node troubleshooting (NotReady, DiskPressure, MemoryPressure), control-plane component failures (API server, kubelet, kube-proxy, etcd), log locations, cluster events, and the standard troubleshooting flow with kubectl describe, kubectl logs, and kubectl get events.

Exam format on the Linux Foundation

The live CKA is a 2-hour performance-based exam — you work in a real Linux terminal with multiple Kubernetes clusters and solve hands-on tasks. The passing score is 66%. The exam is open-book against the official Kubernetes documentation (kubernetes.io and kubernetes.io/blog only). Recertification is required every 2 years.

Our 250-question MCQ bank is the knowledge layer of preparation — it covers all the concepts, commands, and YAML structures you need to be fluent with, so you can focus your hands-on practice on the operational muscle memory the live exam demands. Pair this bank with hands-on practice in killer.sh simulators or kind/minikube clusters.

Who should take this?

DevOps engineers, SREs, platform engineers, cloud architects, full-stack developers moving into infrastructure, and anyone supporting production Kubernetes workloads. CKA is also the prerequisite-style stepping stone to the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) credentials — together they form the standard Kubernetes certification arc. CNCF recommends at least 6 months of practical Kubernetes experience before sitting the exam.

Free to attempt with a TestsWorld account. No card required.