Devops

I passed the CKA in January after four attempts. It taught me how to use Kubernetes. But understanding how the pieces actually fit together — that comes from building it yourself. The CKA taught me how to deploy pods, manage services, troubleshoot containers. Mumshad’s KodeKloud course covered the architecture — the API server, etcd, scheduler, controller-manager, kubelet. But KTHW makes you build those connections yourself: generating the certificates that secure communication between components, creating the kubeconfig files that authenticate them to each other, manually starting each service and seeing how they register. ...

You see the announcement: “I passed the CKA!” Here’s what you don’t see: My story? 41 → 47 → 65 → 81. Four attempts. Three failures. One certification. Here’s what actually happened. The Beginning: September to December 2025 I’d just passed the RHCSA in September 2025. Working in a heavy Kubernetes shop, I figured the CKA would give me the baseline I needed. I knew what K8s was, but I’d never worked with it in a production environment. My company hired me with light K8s skills — now it was time to formalize them. ...