Becoming KCNA Certified book review
The first step to becoming CKA/CKAD?
Okay, I’m not a certified Kubernetes administrator nor a certified Kubernetes application developer (yet), but for sure I intend to become certified in one of those… one day.
Meanwhile, I took the time to read the “Becoming KCNA Certified” book published by Packt Publishing, and I really loved it.
First of all, I was not aware of this associate certification and was delighted to get knowledge of it!
The next reason is that the book is well-written, and as everybody expects from any well-written book; the content has a logic of progression on the matter.
The book’s excerpt is;
- Get to grips with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and its projects
- Build, configure, and run containers with Docker
- Bootstrap minimal Kubernetes clusters for learning
- Manage and encrypt container traffic with Service Mesh
- Deploy, configure, and update applications on Kubernetes
- Control and connect the applications that run on Kubernetes
- Manage storage and provide observability on Kubernetes
- Automate software development with CI/CD and GitOps
and to me, it keeps all of the promises and brings the reader up-to-speed gradually on all the items.
I did not read each and every page of the book, I should confess, because there are lots of concepts that I’m already knowledgeful of and am not going to read them again, this means I zapped the chapters from 1 to 6, everything from the introduction to cloud-native, CNCF… to deploying and scaling applications with Kubernetes. I got more interested from Chapter 7 “Application Placement and Debugging with Kubernetes” till the end of the book, although I only flew over Chapter 9 regarding “Understanding the cloud-native architectures”. The one Chapter which really delighted me is the one on “Telemetry and Observability in the Cloud”.
Now having said that, I do not mean that these chapters are not useful, on the contrary, they are 100% useful for anyone who begins his experience with containers and Kubernetes.
To me, the value of the book resides in the assessment at the end of each chapter which is great. Even the chapters I skipped, I tried the assessment, and I guess everybody who wants to pass the exam should do too (I’m going to plan one :) ).
The code content available on GitHub is also great because it goes beyond the theory and helps those who don’t have a lot of experience to dirty their hands and do real “stuff”. The diagrams included in the book are also really valuable and bring a nice way to memorize concepts for the reader, such as the one below;
In conclusion, I think this book is a great asset for those who are interested in like me to begin with the very first certification in Kubernetes Certifications’ journey.
Just a head’s up; I’m not an employee of Packt Publishing, this review expresses my opinion on a book that concerns the technologies I’m passionate about and use on almost a daily basis.
Thanks for reading!
