How to crack the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam in 2025/2026

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I recently took the CKA exam and achieved a score of 98%. In this post, I want to share some advice on how you can prepare for the certification, whether you already have hands-on experience or are just getting started.

Let me begin with my own situation before I started preparing for the exam. I began working with Kubernetes in May 2025 by building my first one-node cluster, which quickly evolved into a two-node Raspberry Pi setup. I started my journey with k3s and later switched to a kubeadm-based installation. This leads to my first recommendation for beginners: set up a cluster of your own and start deploying real, meaningful workloads. It doesn’t matter what you deploy. What matters is getting familiar with interacting with the Kube-API-Server directly.

In August 2025 I decided to take my preparations more seriously and purchased a Udemy course from Mumshad Mannambeth: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests

This turned out to be the best decision for learning the fundamentals and everything required for the CKA exam. The course is hands-on, covers real-world scenarios, provides online labs to practise the material, offers mock exams that mirror the real test, and includes all the updated topics for the 2025 CKA exam anbd I really think it will also cover any aditional topic for future exam changes.

What you get after purchasing the exam

After finishing this course with all the mock exams, your Kubernetes knowledge foundation should be very solid. From this point, you can (and should) proceed to purchasing the actual exam.

What you will get with your purchase:

• Two exam simulators on killer.sh
• Access to the free CKA preparation platform killercoda
• one free retake
• Hardware and other additional requirements, including optional testing steps

Exam preparation

Now the real exam preparation begins, and you need to strengthen the topics you have already learned from Mumshad’s Udemy course. My recommendation is to start by working through all killercoda scenarios. For additional practice, it can also be useful to explore the free two-node cluster playgrounds.

After completing the killercoda scenarios, you should be well prepared for the two killer.sh exam simulators. These simulators are extremely valuable for getting used to working under time pressure and for familiarizing yourself with the actual exam environment, which is almost identical. Each simulator environment is available for 36 hours.

If you score around 70–80%, that should be more than enough to pass the real exam, which requires 66%. If not, use as much of the 36-hour window as possible (you can safely shut down your computer in between), write down the topics you struggled with, and revisit them using the relevant killercoda scenarios. For the second killer.sh simulator, you should aim to reach at least 70% on your first attempt.

Final tips

Before taking the actual CKA exam, I want to share one final, essential tip. There are GitHub repositories online that maintain question sets very similar to those found in the exam. I won’t provide links to them, but with a bit of research, you can find references to these repositories on forums such as Reddit.

After completing all the previous steps, you are finally ready to take the exam. Schedule your exam at least two weeks in advance, and make sure you meet all system and room requirements. Good luck and all the best! 🍀