CNPE Study Plan¶

Six weeks at 5-7 hours per week. This is a hands-on exam, so most of each week should be at a terminal on a throwaway cluster you can break. Practice reading documentation to find an example, because the curriculum says you will meet unfamiliar tools.

Week 1: Fast Kubernetes¶

• Note 01; write a ResourceQuota and LimitRange from kubectl explain and the docs
• Set up an HPA and see it fail without Metrics Server
• Write a CRD and a custom resource from the docs example

Week 2: GitOps¶

• Note 02, GitOps part; one Argo CD Application with automated, prune, selfHeal
• One Flux GitRepository plus Kustomization with dependsOn
• Break something with kubectl and watch it get reverted

Week 3: CI and progressive delivery¶

• Tekton Pipeline with params, workspace, runAfter, finally
• Argo Rollouts canary with pause: {} and promote
• Flagger Canary with a failing metric and watch the rollback

Week 4: Platform APIs¶

• Note 03; read the Crossplane XRD and Composition pages and describe each field aloud
• Install an operator from OperatorHub and use its custom resource
• Design a small platform API (3 to 5 fields) and write its schema

Week 5: Observability and operations¶

• Note 04; write an alerting rule and trigger it
• Run a Collector locally (see the OTCA guide)
• Debug three broken-cluster scenarios using the incident method

Week 6: Security and review¶

• Note 05; STRICT mTLS for one namespace, Role plus RoleBinding, an audit policy
• One Gatekeeper or Kyverno policy in dry-run, then enforce
• Take the 30 practice questions
• Do both LF simulator attempts, timed, and review every miss