Part 11 of the CKA roadmap · Phase 3 — Services & Networking · 20%
A Service routes by port. It works at layer 4 and knows nothing about HTTP. An Ingress routes
by host and path, at layer 7. That lets one entry point send /app1 to one Service and /app2
to another, where you would otherwise need a load balancer per Service.
Part 8 of the CKA roadmap · Phase 2 — Cluster Architecture · 25%
The 2025 curriculum added the objective "Use Helm and Kustomize to install cluster components". The verb is use. Nothing in it asks you to author a chart. What it asks, in practice:
Part 9 of the CKA roadmap · Phase 2 — Cluster Architecture · 25%
Operators came into the CKA with the 2025 curriculum revision. The objective reads "Understand CRDs, install and configure operators" — and nothing in that line asks you to write a controller or design a CRD. What it does ask for, taken at its word:
Most CKA study plans follow the chapters of whichever study guide you picked. It feels thorough, and it quietly spends your time in the wrong places.
The numbers make the case better than any argument. Below is how the exam weights its five domains, against how many pages the study guide I used spends on each.
Part 1 of the CKA roadmap · Phase 0 — a cluster of your own
Every troubleshooting task on the exam assumes you know what a healthy cluster looks like. The fastest way to learn that is to build one by hand, break it, and put it back — which is why this comes before anything else in the roadmap.
Part 2 of the CKA roadmap · Phase 0 — a cluster of your own
This is the smallest task in the roadmap and the one that pays back fastest.
Over a two-hour exam you type kubectl something like 150 times. At roughly two seconds each for
the long form, that is five minutes spent on spelling a command name. Completion matters more
still: resource names in the exam are long and easy to mistype, and one wrong character means the
task is done against the wrong object.
