Certification Preparation Hub

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →Practice extensively with killer.sh simulator — it mirrors the real exam environment and difficulty level
• →Master imperative kubectl commands (create, run, expose) for speed — declarative YAML takes too long in the exam
• →Set up aliases at exam start: alias k=kubectl, export do='--dry-run=client -o yaml' to save minutes

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →CKA is a prerequisite — ensure your CKA knowledge is solid, especially networking and RBAC
• →Focus on Falco rules syntax, Trivy scanning, and AppArmor/Seccomp profiles — they appear frequently
• →Know how to create and audit NetworkPolicies that deny all ingress/egress by default then allow specific traffic

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →Speed is critical — practice creating pods, deployments, services, and jobs purely with kubectl imperative commands
• →Know multi-container patterns (sidecar, init, ambassador) and how to configure probes, resource limits, and volumes
• →Practice Helm chart debugging (helm template, helm lint) and Kustomize overlays — both appear on the exam

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →Focus on understanding WHEN to use each service rather than deep configuration — the exam tests architectural decision-making
• →Master the differences between S3 storage classes, EBS volume types, and RDS deployment options (Multi-AZ vs Read Replicas)
• →Every question has a correct answer AND a cost-effective answer — learn to identify the 'most cost-effective' vs 'most resilient' patterns

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →Deep-dive into CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy integration patterns — know deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling)
• →Understand CloudFormation drift detection, stack policies, change sets, and nested stacks for IaC questions
• →Study EventBridge rules, CloudWatch composite alarms, and automated remediation with SSM Automation for incident response

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →Know the exact order of terraform workflow commands (init → plan → apply) and what each command does to state
• →Understand state locking, remote backends (S3+DynamoDB), and when terraform refresh vs plan detects drift
• →Study module sources (registry, git, local), input/output variables, and the difference between count and for_each

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →40% of the exam is pipelines — master Azure Pipelines YAML syntax, stages, jobs, deployment strategies, and approvals/gates
• →Understand Azure Repos branching policies, pull request workflows, and integration with Azure Boards for traceability
• →Study Azure Key Vault integration, service connections, managed identities, and how to implement security scanning in pipelines

Exam Domains

Study Tips

• →SRE is 25% of the exam — deeply understand SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and when to freeze deployments vs allow changes
• →Know Cloud Build triggers, build configs, Artifact Registry, Cloud Deploy pipelines, and GKE deployment strategies
• →Study Cloud Monitoring (custom metrics, uptime checks, alerting policies) and Cloud Logging (log-based metrics, sinks, exclusions)