cka-vs-ckad.md

CKA vs. CKAD

Many people ask about this. Here we set out what is in each curricumlum and what is common. Where an item is in both CKA and CKAD, the courses normally share the same videos and labs.

The categories here do not reflect the domains in the actual exam, because the domains are different. A particular concept appears in one domain in CKA and another in CKAD. These categories attempt only to compare the individual concepts more or less at lecture/lab level. The important thing is that you cover all the concepts.

Workloads/Services

Concept	CKA	CKAD
Pod	✔️	✔️
Replicaset	✔️	✔️
Deployment	✔️	✔️
StatefulSet		✔️
DaemonSet	✔️
Job		✔️
CronJob		✔️
Service	✔️	✔️
Headless Service		✔️
Namespace	✔️	✔️
Ingress	✔️	✔️
Multi Container Pods	✔️	✔️
Init Containers	✔️	✔️

Configuration

Concept	CKA	CKAD
Secret	✔️	✔️
ConfigMap	✔️	✔️
Environment Vars	✔️	✔️
Command and Arguments	✔️	✔️
Security Contexts	✔️	✔️
Resource Reqs/Limits	✔️	✔️

Scheduling/Deploying

Concept	CKA	CKAD
Labels & Selectors	✔️	✔️
Annotations	✔️	✔️
Manual Scheduling	✔️
kube-scheduler	✔️
Multiple Schedulers	✔️
Static Pods	✔️
Node Selectors	✔️	✔️
Taints & Tolerations	✔️	✔️
Affinity/Anti-Affinity	✔️	✔️
Deployment Strategies		✔️
Rolling Updates	✔️	✔️
Helm		✔️

Storage

Concept	CKA	CKAD
PersistentVolume	✔️	✔️
PersistentVolumeClaim	✔️	✔️
VolumeClaimTemplate		✔️
HostPath volume	✔️
EmptyDir volume	✔️	✔️
StorageClass (creating)	✔️
StorageClass (using)	✔️	✔️
Storage in Docker	✔️	✔️

Security

Concept	CKA	CKAD
ServiceAccount	✔️	✔️
Role	✔️	✔️
RoleBinding	✔️	✔️
ClusterRole	✔️	✔️
ClusterRoleBinding	✔️	✔️
NetworkPolicy	✔️	✔️
Certificate API	✔️
KUBECONFIG	✔️	✔️
API groups		✔️
API versions		✔️
API deprecations		✔️
Admission Controllers		✔️
Custom Resources		✔️
Operators		✔️

Observability

Concept	CKA	CKAD
Logging	✔️	✔️
Monitoring	✔️	✔️
Managing Application Logs	✔️
Probes (readiness, liveness)		✔️

Cluster Setup and Maintenance

These topics are CKA only

• Cluster Install - Never seen this tested in exam. It would take far longer than 6 min average time per question, but doesn't mean to say that it never will be, therefore you should not skip it! What you certainly won't have to do is to provision virtual machines. That is a Linux SA topic and is only presented here so that you can install your own cluster.
• Cluster Upgrade
• etcd architecture, backup and restore
• Kube Proxy
• CoreDNS

Troubleshooting

These topics are CKA only

• Application failure
• Control plane failure
• Worker Node failure