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Kubernetes Learning Roadmap

A structured path from Kubernetes beginner to CKA/CKAD/CKS certified engineer. Follow the phases in order — each builds on the last.

Estimated time:3–6 months to CKA+2 months for CKAD+3 months for CKS

1🌱

Phase 1 — Core Concepts

Pods & Containersfoundational

Deployments & ReplicaSetsfoundational

Services (ClusterIP/NodePort/LB)foundational

ConfigMaps & Secretsfoundational

Namespacesfoundational

kubectl CLI basicsmust learn

2⚙️

Phase 2 — Workloads

DaemonSets

StatefulSets

Jobs & CronJobs

Init Containers

Resource Requests & Limits

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)

3🌐

Phase 3 — Networking

DNS & Service Discovery

Ingress Controllers (nginx/traefik)

Network Policies

CNI Plugins (Calico/Flannel/Cilium)

Load Balancing

Service Mesh basics (Istio)advanced

4💾

Phase 4 — Storage

PersistentVolumes (PV)

PersistentVolumeClaims (PVC)

StorageClasses

Volume Types (emptyDir, hostPath, NFS)

CSI Drivers

StatefulSet storage patterns

5🔐

Phase 5 — Security

RBAC (Roles, Bindings, ServiceAccounts)

Pod Security Admission (PSA)

Secrets management (Vault, Sealed Secrets)

Network Policies (deny-all + allow-list)

Image scanning (Trivy/Snyk)important

OPA / Gatekeeperadvanced

6📊

Phase 6 — Observability

Prometheus + Grafana

Loki (log aggregation)

Distributed tracing (Jaeger/Tempo)

Alertmanager rules

kubectl top / metrics-server

Debugging with kubectl

7🔄

Phase 7 — GitOps & CI/CD

Helm charts & releases

ArgoCD GitOps workflow

Kustomize overlays

CI pipeline (GitHub Actions / GitLab)

Image promotion across envs

Rolling updates & canary deploymentsimportant

8🏅

Phase 8 — Certifications

CKA — Certified Kubernetes Administratorstart here

CKAD — Certified Kubernetes App Developerparallel

CKS — Certified Kubernetes Securityafter CKA

Practice exams (killer.sh)

Time management in examstip

KCNA — Kubernetes & Cloud Native Associate

Ready to start?

Begin with interview questions to assess your current level.

Beginner Questions CKA Cert Guide