My journey to become CKA and CKAD

Hi, people that read me!

I usually don’t write about my achievements. Still, I’m proud of what I did, and in this post I want to share my journey to that back in July I passed two essential certifications for me, the CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) and the CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer). Those certs are important to me because one of my professional goals is to apply all my knowledge as an SRE (Site Reliabilty Engineer), so I’m putting all my effort to get trained and gain experience as I believe that Kubernetes is and will continue to be widely used by the industry I want to be part of that.

I put a lot of hours/practice on my study lately, but my journey started probably 3 years ago, or even more time (don’t remember exacly). Still, I remember that I become interested when I was talking with my friends @yazpik and @tonyskapunk about the new stuff that is comming on tech, by that time they were running a Kubernetes Meetup at the Castle and I started to assist to each meetup.

Being honest, at the begginning, I barely understand all the concepts and projects that the speakers were talking about but once I started to get involved reading blog posts, practicing (Yeah I did the ‘Kubernetes the Hard way’ on minikube), also began to follow and test other exciting projects like Rancher. So after a while, I started to understand better what the speaker was trying to communicate. And that helps me a lot to understand not only the basics but some good projects that work in conjunction with Kubernetes.

With all the meetings that were held on Rackspace I get involved and I wanted to keep learning more so, I decided to assist to Kubecon North America 2018 that was held on Seattle, and I like to think that this set of conferences opened my mind for all the Kubernetes environment, and I feel that I need to keep learning even more about this awesome technology, that keeps me motivated to get my certifications too, in a nutshell I feel inspired about the conferences, the comunity, everything and I want to be part of it.

Talking about community, in that kubecon I met with some Latin-American friends that were interested in Kubernetes like @domix, @marKox,both from México, and @EdduMelendez from Peru, that from their trenches they are trying to grow the Kubernetes community on Spanish.

But returning to my certifications path, after a while I decided that I will have the certs by the end on this year, so back in March I get more serious studying and purchased the excellent course Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) with Practice Tests a course by Mumshad Mannambeth that I highly recommend to reinforce the theory and also, becasue includes exercises similar to the exam that you can practice.

Once I feelt confident in me and my knowledge I get my coupon to present the CKA exam, and I passed!

I need tell you, it wasn’t easy, mostly because you need to be careful with the time/value of the questions and you need to weigh to reach the passing score, for this exam it was 74%.

Of course after I get the CKA certitification, I was super happy but on my train of thoughts, I keep thinking that I can use the CKA study as leverage to get the CKAD.

I already have the fundamentals of a CKA and just need some extra study to complement the CKAD curriculum, so I got commited (my wife too), and right away I got my CKAD exam coupon and I scheduled the test 2 weeks appart after I decided to get the cert (That’s 3 weeks appart after I took the CKA exam).

My approach works, I passed the CKAD certification!

Now that I’m certified on Kubernetes I will look to be more involved in Cloud Native initiatives on my company, to apply the knowledge that I already have on current or new projects, and as always keep learning!