Mock Exam 2 — Advanced CKAD

This mock exam raises the difficulty from the first practice exam. The 20 tasks here target areas where candidates lose points under pressure: multi-step resource creation, debugging broken workloads, security contexts, network policies, Helm operations, and full-stack assembly tasks that chain multiple concepts together.

Exam Parameters

Parameter	Value
Total Tasks	20
Allotted Time	120 minutes
Passing Score	66%
Environment	Two clusters: `ckad-cluster1` (default), `ckad-cluster2`
Allowed Resources	kubernetes.io/docs, helm.sh/docs

How to Use This Mock Exam

Set a timer for 120 minutes. Do not pause, do not look at the solutions in Chapter 29, and do not search outside the allowed documentation. The point is to simulate actual exam conditions — including the stress of not knowing whether your answer is correct.

Read every task carefully before typing. Several tasks contain deliberate traps: a wrong image name, a mismatched label, a port that doesn’t line up. Skimming the requirements costs more time than reading them twice.

Work in order unless you’re stuck. If a task takes longer than 8 minutes and you’re not close to finishing, mark it and move on. Return to skipped tasks after completing the rest. Every task in this exam carries equal weight (5%), so spending 20 minutes on one task means sacrificing time that could solve two or three others.

Track your namespace usage. Most tasks specify a namespace. Forgetting to create it or deploying resources into the wrong namespace is the most common reason for lost points on an otherwise correct solution.

After completing the exam, check your work against the solutions in Chapter 29. For each task you got wrong, identify whether the issue was knowledge (you didn’t know the API field), speed (you ran out of time), or precision (you had the right idea but a typo or missing field caused failure).

Scoring

Each of the 20 tasks is worth 5% of the total score. Partial credit applies when specified within a task — for example, if a task has three sub-requirements, each sub-requirement may carry a portion of that task’s 5%.

Aim to complete all 20 tasks within the time limit. A passing score of 66% means you can miss up to 7 tasks entirely and still pass, but leaving tasks unanswered when you know the material is a strategy failure, not a knowledge failure.

Task Listing

The tasks are split across two sections:

Section 1 (Tasks 1–10): Namespace quotas, security contexts, debugging broken deployments, canary deployments, CronJobs, Secrets and ConfigMaps, NetworkPolicies, StatefulSets, Service debugging, and Helm operations.
Section 2 (Tasks 11–20): Init containers, DaemonSets, TLS Ingress, ephemeral volumes and OOM behavior, ServiceAccount RBAC, Ingress routing, scheduling diagnostics, Job failure handling, blue-green deployments, and a full-stack aggregate task.

Proceed to Section 1 when your timer starts.