In July I became a CKA on my second attempt, improving my score from 67% to 79% (74% to pass). A couple of people – nerds, really – asked me about it, so I thought I’d write down some of the things I picked up along the way. What worked Practice effect. I took the exam twice! Practical experience. Second time around, I really took the time to familiarize with kubectl, and at work I deployed a CI/CD integration with my cluster, and that helped for sure, too.

Recently I’ve been working w/ GitLab Runners, starting with Shell Executor before moving on to Docker. Self-signed Anyway, my GitLab instance uses a self-signed certificate. This is not great as our tooling essentially needs to work around errors like this: ERROR: Registering runner... failed runner=EfnphyLc status=couldn't execute POST against https://example.com/api/v4/runners: Post https://example.com/api/v4/runners: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority PANIC: Failed to register this runner. Perhaps you are having network problems Config In your config.

Of late I’ve come to use two very different kinds of (smart)watch. Currently I prioritize heart rate and step tracking, so I’ve opted to eschew the typical smartwatch-y things. The Contenders 2018 Apple Watch Nike+ Series 4 (44 mm). Apple’s device sports a beautiful, fully digital face, and must be paired with iPhone. Apple Watch is pretty much an iPhone for the wrist, supporting such things as making and receiving calls, text messages, and turn-by-turn navigation.

I developed this cheatsheet because I love using Docker, your mileage will vary. I got a lot of value from this paid Docker course published on Udemy. Midway through, I realized that it was relatively easy to containerize the entire blog, and so here goes. Registries Pull alpine off Docker Hub: $ docker pull alpine:latest latest: Pulling from library/alpine Digest: sha256:46e71df1e5191ab8b8034c5189e325258ec44ea739bba1e5645cff83c9048ff1 Status: Downloaded newer image for alpine:latest Search Quay for alpine:

Completed this one on a wintry Sydney morning. Despite a lack of sleep, I felt much better prepared vs. DevOps Pro, and it showed in the grade, too: Overall Score: 75% Topic Level Scoring High Availability and Business Continuity: 72% Costing: 75% Deployment Management: 57% Network Design: 42% Data Storage: 72% Security: 85% Scalability & Elasticity: 90% Cloud Migration & Hybrid Architecture: 85% Scratchpad ASG; CloudFormation, using YAML/JSON for solution architecture: Which Services are supported?

So I covered my eyes for a bit when I clicked ‘Finish’ (the test attempt), as this was the toughest exam I’d faced thus far, and I was maybe 70% satisfied with my body of work. Fortuitously, I passed, albeit with an overall score of 65%:- Topic Level Scoring Continuous Delivery and Process Automation: 47% Monitoring, Metrics, and Logging: 93% Security, Governance, and Validation: 75% High Availability and Elasticity: 83% I really need to backtrack, figure out this CI/CD thing, then.