Solutions: Workloads and Scheduling Exercises

This chapter provides complete, verified solutions for the five exercises spanning Chapters 6 through 9. These exercises cover the core of the CKAD “Workloads & Scheduling” domain — multi-container Pods, Deployment rollouts, parallel Jobs, node selection, and taint-based scheduling.

How to use these solutions:

1. Attempt the exercise first. Spend at least 15 minutes working through each exercise before consulting the solution. Struggling through problems — even when you get stuck — builds stronger retention than reading the answer.

2. Compare your approach. If your solution works differently from what is shown here, that is fine. Kubernetes often offers multiple valid paths to the same outcome. What matters is whether your result satisfies the stated requirements.

3. Run the verification steps. Every solution concludes with concrete verification commands and their expected output. Run these against your own cluster to confirm your implementation matches the expected state.

4. Study the troubleshooting notes. Common mistakes are flagged with their symptoms and fixes. If you hit an error during the exercise, check the troubleshooting guidance before starting over.

The solutions are organized into two sections. The first covers Pod and Deployment exercises (sidecar logging and rolling updates), which test your ability to compose multi-container workloads and manage application lifecycle. The second covers Job and scheduling exercises (parallel Jobs, nodeSelector, and taints/tolerations), which test your control over where and how workloads execute across the cluster.