Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

The Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam certifies that users can design, build, configure, and expose cloud native applications for Kubernetes.

Who Is It For:

This certification is for Kubernetes engineers, cloud engineers and other IT professionals responsible for building, deploying, and configuring cloud native applications with Kubernetes.

About This Certification:

CKAD has been developed by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to help expand the Kubernetes ecosystem through standardized training and certification. This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that consists of a set of performance-based tasks (problems) to be solved in a command line.

What It Demonstrates:

The K8 Application Developer can design build, configure and expose cloud native applications for Kubernetes. A CKAD can define application resources and use core primitives to build, monitor, and troubleshoot scalable applications & tools in Kubernetes.
The exam assumes knowledge of, but does not test for, container runtimes and microservice architecture.

The successful candidate will be comfortable using:

  • An OCI-Compliant Container Runtime, such as Docker or rkt.
  • Cloud Native application concepts and architectures.
  • A Programming language, such as Python, Node.js, Go, or Java.

Exam Details & Resources:

This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based test that consists of a set of performance-based tasks (problems) to be solved in a command line. Candidates have 2 hours to complete the tasks.

Candidates who register for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam will have 2 attempts (per exam registration) to an exam simulator, provided by Killer.sh.  

The exam is based on Kubernetes v1.21.
The CKAD exam environment will be aligned with the most recent K8s minor version within approximately 4 to 8 weeks of the K8s release date