Life After CKA Badge

Congratulations if you just got your CKA badge! So, you now may be wondering, what's next? If so, then this article is for you.

To pass the CKA is now as easier as to earn an associate AWS certification in the way that the theory is not enough to pass the CKA exam but a bunch of actual experience with Kubernetes since this is a live-practical test - i.e. a lot of imperative commands using 'kubectl' and some manifest writing in order to solve the CKA exam questions.

But here is the catch with the CKA badge: it is not enough to get a job within Kubernetes related roles like Operations Engineer or DevOps Engineer. Why? Because you will be facing a lot out-of-scope CKA training/exam scenarios like creating a Kubernetes cluster using only the Cloud Serverless solutions like EKS, AKS, GKE, etc. - that means, without manual/automated virtualization and without Kubernetes management overhead such as creating 'Control Plane' replicas, neither 'etcd' replicas for high availability and resiliency.

So, what you can do to be prepared for a Cloud Kubernetes interview? Learn the Kubernetes Serverless solution from your favorite Cloud Provider. As an example, I will talk about EKS solution as AWS is my personally-defined career path within the Cloud.

Here are some questions that may get you an idea about what you will be facing during a technical Cloud Kubernetes interview - again, taking AWS EKS as an example:

• Which are the main advantages of using EKS for a Kubernetes cluster?
• When would you not use EKS and switch to a 'kubeadm' Kubernetes cluster?
• How would you deploy a world-wide EKS cluster? Which criteria would you apply to make it high-available, resilient, secure and cost-effective?
• Which tools would you use to automate EKS cluster deployment and why?
• When would you choose to use Fargate over EC2 managed nodes?
• What strategy and which tool(s) you would use to monitor and manage a lot of multi-domain certificates that need to be renewed across several multi-region clusters?
• Which steps are involved in creating an Application Load Balancer in EKS using manifest files only?
• Other than Terraform and CloudFormation, which other tool would you use to build and deploy an EKS cluster?
• What happens if you manually changed something like adding a tag in an EKS cluster that was created using 'eksctl'?
• Which are the challenges of using Block Storage within a multi-region EKS cluster?
• How would you create a Block Storage or File Storage solution that will be attached to an EKS cluster?
• Which are the best practices to have the full EKS cluster and external services fully secured at rest and in-transit?
• How would you attach a Cloud RDS service to your EKS cluster? Let's say, an AWS Aurora MySQL database for an application deployed in EKS. Then, how you can ensure that the connection and data is 100% secure?
• How would you create an empty EKS cluster? And then, how would you added managed EC2 nodes to that cluster?
• Is there a way to integrate Let's Encrypt as a Certificate Manager within an EKS cluster? If so, which are the components (manifests) and steps that are needed so the running pods can automatically pull the new/renewed certificates?

These are just a few real-world interview questions that you - most likely - will not be able to answer by just passing the CKA exam. Whenever it is AWS, Azure or GCP, you really need to dig into your Cloud career-path to learn and practice a lot with managed Kubernetes solutions.

So, now you know what type of questions can be faced in a Kubernetes interview regardless of the badge(s) you achieved: CKA, CKAD and/or CKS. I personally recommend you search for tutorials and/or videos in medium.com, youtube.com and even in udemy.com for learning material on managed Cloud Kubernetes solutions such as EKS, AKS or GCP - depending on your Cloud carrer-path. Also, please take in consideration that - at least within AWS - there is no Associate neither Professional certification that approaches a deep dive into managed Kubernetes services. This is why I am sharing my own experience and learnt best-practices so save you a lot of time and headaches trying to figure out what's next after getting a Kubernetes Certification badge. Hopefully, you may find this article useful.