Welcome to this learning path designed to prepare you for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam. In this short video, we’ll take a quick look at what you can expect from this learning path and the exam itself.

Let's start by talking about the exam. The CKAD exam is a practical exam. That is, it's going to test your ability to work with live Kubernetes clusters, and covers Kubernetes skills in the following domains: Application Design and Build, Application Deployment, Application observability and maintenance, Application Environment, Configuration and Security, and Services and Networking.

After passing the exam, your certification will remain valid for three years. And you can keep your certification active by retaking and passing the exam again before your certificate expires.

This learning path has a lot of tips to help you succeed in passing the exam, as well as an exam guide course in which we'll explain the exam procedure. A link to the official exam website is provided in the description of the course. From there, you can find several documents including the official candidate handbook and curriculum overview.

This learning path is designed for application developers working with Kubernetes who want to get certified,  but anyone interested in understanding more about how to work with Kubernetes will certainly benefit from taking this learning path.

Before you start this learning path, you should already be comfortable with containers and Docker. If you need to develop your container know-how, the Docker in-depth learning path here on Cloud Academy is a great way to build up your skills! We’ll be using Kubernetes running on Linux machines, so you should also be comfortable working with Linux shells. 

In order to prepare you effectively, this learning path contains labs that have been tailored specifically to simulate the sort of tasks you’ll need to complete during the CKAD exam. Even if you’re not planning on taking the exam, by the end of this learning path, you’ll be confident building applications using Kubernetes.

We’ll round off the learning path with hands-on labs, lab challenges, and an exam that will cover all of the domains assessed by the actual CKAD exam. These will give you plenty of practice solving exam-like problems to prepare you for the test. The practice exams also provide full solution guides along with tips to ensure your success in the exam. If you do well on those, then you should be in great shape for the big day!

One more thing to remember is that you’re allowed to have one browser tab open during the exam to look at the official Kubernetes documentation, blog, and GitHub repository. I encourage you to become familiar with them, as they might help you to save precious time during the exam! The practice exams provide suggested bookmarks in the solution guides to help get you ready.

So, let’s finish up here and get started with the learning path. As with all our content on Cloud Academy, we are happy to hear from you. So please give us your feedback on this learning path when you have completed it! Thank you.