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Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Standardize your team on Certified Kubernetes Administrator with a structured Kubernetes training path — a blueprint-weighted practice exam and team admin reporting included on every CBT Nuggets Teams seat.

Book a DemoAll Kubernetes certs
1
Course
1
Practice exam
6
Core skills
$445
Exam fee (Kubernetes)
Platform engineering team reviewing Kubernetes dashboards and CI/CD pipelines
Difficulty
Difficulty: 3 of 5 (Moderate)
Moderate
Exam fee (Kubernetes)
$445
Courses on path
1
Official source
Kubernetes’s official exam page
Exam code
  • CKA

Exam datasheet

Format
Performance-based tasks
Prerequisites
None
Recommended experience
Experience working with Kubernetes
Recertification
3 years
Testing center

Exams

Exams for this certification

Exam fees per engineer, paid to the exam vendor$445

Exam — Required

Every engineer on the Certified Kubernetes Administrator path takes CKA.

  1. CKACertified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)Practice exam included on every Teams seat
    Exam fee
    $445
    Exam length
    2 hours

    Exam blueprint: CKA

Skills your team builds

Kubernetes cluster architectureInstallation and configurationWorkloads and schedulingServices and networkingStorageTroubleshooting

Training path

Your team's training path

One CBT Nuggets course covers the full Certified Kubernetes Administrator path. Your team can start today and have admin reporting visible from day one.

  1. Start here · primary course

    Certified Kubernetes Administrator

    This Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) training takes systems administrators from cluster setup through scaling, security, and troubleshooting. Taught with real-world examples, it covers installing and configuring Kubernetes clusters for high availability, deploying and scaling workloads with ReplicaSets, Deployments, and autoscalers, securing clusters with RBAC, Pod Security, and access control, managing storage and networking with EBS, ClusterIP, Ingress, and network policies, and monitoring and debugging workloads with probes, the metrics server, and debugging tools, including on AWS EKS. For an IT Director whose platform team runs containerized applications, the CKA is the recognized way to confirm that administrators can keep the application lifecycle reliable and efficient. Individual administrators earn the same Linux Foundation certification.

    Trevor Sullivan
    88 videosPractice exam17h
    Open course

Every certification course includes

  • Expert-led video training
  • Certification practice exams
  • Per-team completion reporting

Kubernetes career ladder

Where Certified Kubernetes Administrator sits in your team's Kubernetes progression

The cert your team is on now, plus the levels above and below. Use this to map an engineer's next-step credential or to plan headcount coverage across tiers.

  1. Professional level

    3 certs

    Certified Kubernetes Administrator

    CKA

    You are here

    Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

    CKAD

    Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist

    CKS

Customer outcome

Build CKA capability across the whole team, not one engineer

Assign the Certified Kubernetes Administrator course to the engineers who need it, and the team report shows who has started, who has finished, and who has passed the practice exam — the view leadership uses to see Kubernetes skills coverage across the team and where the gaps are.

See team pricing

Team capability

Make CKA a number on your team capability sheet, not a single engineer’s certificate.

Standardizing your team on CKA gives leadership a clear picture of Kubernetes skills coverage — who has completed the training, who is still on the path, and where the gaps are — so staffing and escalation plans rest on known capability instead of on one engineer.

Credential: Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Exam
  • CKA

Frequently asked questions about Certified Kubernetes Administrator training

Common questions IT directors ask when evaluating Certified Kubernetes Administrator training for their team.

How does Certified Kubernetes Administrator fit into our compliance or governance program?

IT leaders often cite the CKA when documenting that the engineers who run production clusters hold a credential spanning cluster access, traffic control, and upgrade practices. CBT Nuggets team reporting supplies per-learner progress, completion, and completion exports that can serve as audit evidence of that training coverage. How the credential maps to a specific control framework is a decision for the auditor's crosswalk.

Who on the team should hold Certified Kubernetes Administrator, and what can a certified team own?

The CKA fits the platform, DevOps, and systems engineers accountable for keeping Kubernetes clusters running day to day. The linked course prepares them to own kubeadm cluster deployment and upgrades, RBAC, CoreDNS and cluster networking, ingress controllers, and network policy. It also covers horizontal pod and cluster autoscaling, liveness and readiness probes, and cluster troubleshooting with advanced kubectl usage.

What does CBT Nuggets Certified Kubernetes Administrator training include for a team?

CBT Nuggets Certified Kubernetes Administrator courses are built by named expert trainers. Where a course includes hands-on virtual labs or a practice exam mapped to Kubernetes's published exam objectives, the course list on this page says so. Team admin reporting tracks assignment, completion and exam readiness per engineer — the view managers use to run a team training program.

How do I assign and track Certified Kubernetes Administrator training for my team?

From the admin console, managers assign the Certified Kubernetes Administrator courses directly to specific engineers or role groups and track completion and practice-exam scores per learner. Team-wide reporting rolls up to a single dashboard you can review or export for leadership reviews or compliance reporting.

How long does it take to certify a team on Certified Kubernetes Administrator?

The linked CBT Nuggets training runs about 17 hours of video across the live courses mapped to the CKA. Actual time to certify depends on the team's starting point, especially existing hands-on experience with containers and Linux-based cluster administration.

What if Kubernetes updates the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam objectives?

CBT Nuggets updates Kubernetes course content as exam objectives refresh, and this page shows the current exam's status and any retirement date the vendor has announced. When Kubernetes restructures or renames a track, the assigned training stays aligned with the same team training plan, and the training stays current without anyone losing their progress mid-stream.

Ready to Certified Kubernetes Administrator-certify your team?

Build Certified Kubernetes Administrator capability across your team

See how CBT Nuggets helps IT leaders plan and track Certified Kubernetes Administrator training across the team — a practice exam and reporting included.

Book a Demo