CKNE Study Plan¶

Six weeks at 5-7 hours per week. This is a hands-on exam, so spend most of each week at a terminal on a throwaway cluster you are allowed to break. If you have not passed CKA, expect to need a few extra weeks of Kubernetes fundamentals.

Week 1: CNI and Pod connectivity¶

• Note 01; read your cluster's CNI config directory and Pod CIDR settings
• Break Pod-to-Pod traffic on purpose and walk the troubleshooting order
• Optional: attach a second interface with Multus

Week 2: Services, kube-proxy and DNS¶

• Note 02, first half; every Service type, a selector-less Service with an EndpointSlice
• Find out which kube-proxy mode your cluster uses
• Edit the coredns ConfigMap with a stub domain and watch it reload

Week 3: Gateway API¶

• Install a Gateway API implementation, create a GatewayClass, Gateway and HTTPRoute
• Weighted split, then a header-match rule
• Make a cross-namespace route work with allowedRoutes

Week 4: Network security¶

• Note 04; default-deny, then allow DNS and one app path
• HTTPS listener with certificateRefs; a cross-namespace Secret with a ReferenceGrant
• STRICT mTLS and one AuthorizationPolicy, or Cilium encryption

Week 5: Advanced traffic¶

• Note 03; egress gateway walkthrough, multicluster concepts, BGP advertisement concepts
• Read the Gateway API Inference Extension docs for InferencePool

Week 6: Observability and review¶

• Note 05; Hubble drops, CoreDNS metrics, Istio access logs
• Take the 30 practice questions
• Timed practice: three broken-network tasks in two hours