Exam Prep: Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)

A Deployment that never becomes ready, a Service that routes to nothing, a Pod stuck in Pending: explaining situations like these takes the same concepts the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate exam tests in its multiple-choice questions. This exam-prep course pairs teaching lessons with original scenario questions, and every answer option comes with an explanation of why it holds or fails.

The course follows the four KCNA domains in proportion to their exam weight. It starts with containers and the Kubernetes architecture: the control plane, nodes, the API, and the objects you declare. It then works through Pods, workload controllers, scheduling, and resource requests, before moving to container orchestration: Services and DNS, ingress and network policies, volumes and storage classes, RBAC and Pod security, and the commands you use to troubleshoot a failing workload. Later chapters cover cloud native application delivery with GitOps, Helm, and CI/CD, and close with cloud native architecture: autoscaling, serverless, observability with metrics, logs, and traces, and how CNCF projects and the Kubernetes community are governed.

Each lesson teaches what its own questions test, so you can study one lesson at a time. The course suits developers, operators, and anyone starting out with Kubernetes; the exam has no prerequisites, and some familiarity with the Linux command line helps.