Hey guys, looking for advice on the best way to learn Kubernetes and prepare for the CKAD. I feel like rounding out the edges on my Kubernetes skills and getting certified could be a huge help to me as it's a weak spot in my resume/experience. There are so many resources out there designed for this that it's overwhelming. What personally worked for you guys?

I originally used the Linux Academy CKAD course, which I found pretty good. Unfortunately they've been acquired twice now (first by A Cloud Guru, then by Pluralsight) so no idea if their version of the course is any good still unfortunately https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/certified-kubernetes-application-developer-ckad-2023

Honestly, find a mentor

As a cloud engineer does the CKAD make the most sense or is there a reason to consider the CKA instead? I do have access on udemy through my employer for the Linux Academy CKAD course as well as Mumshad's CKAD course.

Depends whether you're going through the training/certifications to learn, or just to strengthen your resume? Realistically if you have baseline knowledge of Kubernetes then they're mostly to flex your CLI recall abilities, otherwise it can be good to learn some of that baseline knowledge.

Yeah, I kinda assumed that you might not have anyone at your company to work with. I had to learn k8s by myself in a multibillion dollar company as a pilot project... and to say it was stressful is an understatement. I've now helped out a bunch of jr engineers at the various places I've been to not have to go it alone.

I understand now. My organization does use Kubernetes but since we are so large there is an EKS team that handles many of the guardrails/configuration that the rest of the engineers here use. We have our helm charts for our 2 spring boot APIs, we create a docker image and a new helm chart artifact and upload both to artifactory, then we have some scripts that run as part of our continuous delivery pipeline that updates the inactive deployment, switches it to active, and then downscales the old active environment. The company also manages an open source CLI tool called Kconnect which I can then use to log in and access our the shared EKS clusters. From there I can see the pods/deployments/services in the namespaces for my apps and manage them. I am not a complete beginner but despite all of this exposure the reality is most of this was set up long before I joined the team 4 years ago. My current team only has 2 API's that use kubernetes/EKS and in reality we don't need to worry too much about scaling because they are part of an internal developer platform that simply doesn't get the same volume of traffic as a product app. As such I feel like my own familiarity is pretty surface level and it's a weak point in my experience as so many platform engineering roles require deep kubernetes. Ultimately I am looking for my next role in the next few months and trying to get exposure to increase my odds of finding a desirable job. I have considered reaching out to my EKS team to learn more about their processes but I think a certification would help me get knowledge in those areas that my company/team has automated/offloaded/obfuscated.

I got a Udemy subscription and took the "Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) with Tests" course. It's $18 with a plan. You get access to kodekloud for some hands on experience. Definitely take the practice tests, as the linux VM they provide is a lot different than the environment provided by kodekloud.

I am currently doing the course on udemy with the access to Kodekloud. Very intuitive (except for a few times the labs asked questions we weren't taught yet).

@Angelo Carbonaro there are a lot of opportunities you can use to learn more concepts. Look at the following https://github.com/sailor-sh/CK-X which is a great way to simulate how your exam would look like. To prep you can look at https://github.com/dgkanatsios/CKAD-exercises ( and of course other resources previosly mentioned in the thread ). Also consider reading some of great posts at https://learnkube.com/archive And personally I would recommend trying https://cnoe.io/docs/idpbuilder which allows you to locally test various scenarios and setups. You could potentially task yourself with creating an internal IDP with certain components , mock AWS with loclastack and interact with

locally running AWS services

... Good luck with your journey!