CNCF-CKAD Exam Information and Outline
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
Syllabus Update Checked on: October 30, 2026
CNCF-CKAD Exam Syllabus & Study Guide
Before you start practicing with our exam simulator, it is essential to understand the
official CNCF-CKAD exam objectives. This course outline serves as your roadmap.
The information below reflects the 2026 syllabus defined by
CNCF.
Below are complete topics detail with latest syllabus and course outline, that will help you good knowledge about exam objectives and topics that you have to prepare. These contents are covered in questions and answers pool of exam.
- Exam Format
- Performance-based, command-line tasks in live Kubernetes clusters; 2 hours
- Application Design and Build (20%)
- Define, build and modify container images
- Choose workload resources: Deployment, DaemonSet, CronJob, Job
- Multi-container Pod design patterns (sidecar, init containers)
- Utilize persistent and ephemeral volumes
- Application Deployment (20%)
- Deployment strategies: blue/green and canary
- Rolling updates and rollbacks
- Helm package manager and Kustomize
- Application Observability and Maintenance (15%)
- API deprecations
- Probes and health checks
- Built-in CLI monitoring tools
- Container logs and debugging
- Application Environment, Configuration and Security (25%)
- CRDs and operators
- Authentication, authorization and admission control
- Requests, limits and quotas
- ConfigMaps and Secrets
- ServiceAccounts and SecurityContexts
- Services and Networking (20%)
- NetworkPolicies
- Services and troubleshooting access
- Ingress rules to expose applications