I wanted to renew my expired CKS certification. After some studying, I decided to just go for it.
My first attempt was on Sunday, November 10, 2024, at 10:30 PM, and it ended in catastrophic failure. However, I’ve also learned some lessons from it.
1. Time is everything
I scheduled the exam at a late time, I know here I’m overstating the obvious but honestly I just underestimated the exam.
It’s not an easy one and It’s very time consuming, you will need every minute because you’re only given 2 hours to solve 16 performance-based tasks, that’s not a lot of time at all and my first attempt resulted in me not having enough time to go through 4 of these questions.
2. Reiterate over the new exam objectives
Since I was previously CKS certified, I just assumed there wouldn’t be significant changes. Boy, was I wrong!
The exam changed a lot and that was a surprise for me (Not a good one when you’re taking the exam) so better check the new objectives, here i’m listing the weakness points for me on the first attempt:
- Implement Pod-to-Pod encryption using Cilium
- Understand your supply chain (e.g. SBOM, CI/CD, artifact repositories)
- Use appropriate pod security standards
3. Use exam simulators
You can use the provided CKS exam simulator at killer.sh as a way of validation, personally I didn’t invest heavily in it, I just wanted to have a feeling of the exam environment once more as i was preparing for my 2nd attempt.
4. Reschedule ASAP
My second attempt was on Sunday, November 24, 2024, at 8:30 AM , I tried to reschedule it earlier but there should also be some room to reiterate over why the first attempt was a failure.
Regardless It was done in the same month and thankfully the goal was accomplished.
Certificate verification can be done via LF-k6nmlvu9yy.