Two years ago I collected all five Kubernetes certifications in about three months. CKA, CKAD, CKS, KCNA and KCSA. That made me a Kubestronaut.
Certifications expire, though. Mine started coming due this year: CKAD on October 6, CKS in December.
The part where I almost didn’t
My first instinct was to let it go.
Two reasons, and neither of them was pride. Money was the first one. Five exams at Linux Foundation prices is not a small line item when you are paying for it yourself in rupees. Time was the second. Five exams meant five separate preparation cycles, five rounds of late nights after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep, and I had already done exactly that once.
The badge is nice. It is not worth two more months of my life, I told myself.
Then CNCF changed the rules
In March 2026, CNCF announced the CARE program, short for Certification Advancement & Recertification Experience. The idea is simple and, honestly, overdue. If you earn or recertify a higher-level certification, it should renew the lower-level one that already sits inside it.
Here is how the cascade works today:
- Passing or recertifying CKA or CKAD automatically renews KCNA.
- Passing or recertifying CKS automatically renews KCSA.
- Passing or recertifying CKS also extends CKA, an expansion announced a few months later. It works even if your CKA has already expired.
Do that arithmetic for a Kubestronaut and the whole thing collapses. CKS renews KCSA and CKA. CKAD renews KCNA. Five certifications, two exams. That is the entire program.
Two caveats are worth knowing before you plan around it. You have to have earned the lower certification already, because passing CKS will not hand you a CKA you never had. And the CKS-extends-CKA rule only applies to CKS attempts on or after June 18, 2026. It is not retroactive. The full rules live on the CARE program page.
Two exams instead of five changed the maths completely. So I swallowed the hard pill and booked.
The cost, honestly
I am not going to pretend this was cheap. Even after a 55% discount, the two exams came to roughly ₹40,000. That is real money.
What made it defensible was the cascade. ₹40,000 to keep five certifications current is a very different proposition from ₹40,000 for two. I still winced at the payment screen.
Eat the frog first
CKAD was expiring first, on October 6, so the obvious move was to renew that one first.
I did the opposite. CKS is the harder exam, and I did not want it sitting there waiting for me at the end. Eat the frog first. I put CKS ahead of CKAD with about a week between them.
My original slots were CKS on September 26 and CKAD on October 3. Then I pulled both forward a week, to CKS on September 19 and CKAD on September 26. That bought me a fortnight of margin before the CKAD expiry and, more usefully, left me no room to procrastinate. That was rather the point. When I prepared for CKS the first time, procrastination cost me an attempt.
What I studied with
I started with video courses and gave up on them. The plan was to skim the KodeKloud CKS and CKAD courses to refresh the concepts. Even at 2x speed it was painfully slow. My Lord, it takes time. Video is a great format for learning something the first time and a terrible one for reminding yourself of something you already know. After a few evenings I dropped it completely.
Then I switched to practice only. Two platforms did all the real work.
killer.sh is the official simulator. Two sessions come free with your exam booking, and each one gives you 36 hours of access to the environment. It is deliberately harder than the real thing, which is exactly what you want. Don’t treat those two sessions as two chances to score well. Treat them as 72 hours of a hard lab where you are allowed to fail.
prepium.sh was the find of this round. My friend Vijay pointed me to it. It is about $29 for a 14-day window per certification, with hands-on tasks graded by programmatic validators, partial credit, and an attempt history that tells you what you missed and why. There are 16 tasks on the CKS track and 17 on the CKAD track, plus quiz banks on top. So many scenarios, and engaging enough that I kept coming back to it. Worth every rupee. It is an independent practice environment, by the way, not affiliated with CNCF or the Linux Foundation.
And one thing I did not expect to matter: the K8s Guide iOS app. Adaptive quizzes and short lessons across all five certifications, which turned the dead ten minutes in a queue or waiting for a build into recall practice. It also kept me up to date on what had changed in the curriculum since 2024, which for CKS is not a small thing.
Through all of it, thank God. He carried me and gave me the strength to get through the concepts in the time I had.
Exam day: the rust is real
It had been almost two years since I last sat a proctored exam, and I had forgotten most of the ritual. Check-in, the room scan, the remote desktop. All of it felt unfamiliar in a way I had not budgeted for.
The real friction was copy and paste. I work on a Mac, in vim, and the muscle memory I use every day is simply wrong inside that exam environment. Every wasted keystroke there is time you don’t get back. That is the strongest argument I know for practising in a browser-based lab instead of your own terminal. By the time I sat the real exam, killer.sh and prepium had already beaten those quirks into my hands.
My strategy was the same one that worked in 2024. If a question smells expensive, flag it and move on. Network policies, audit policy configuration, cluster upgrades, anything with a long tail of fiddly steps gets left behind on the first pass and picked up once the cheap points are banked. Running out of time is what failed me on my first CKS attempt. It has not failed me since.
CKAD a week later was all about speed. That is the whole exam and always has been. Having sat CKS seven days earlier helped enormously. The environment was fresh, the imperative kubectl shortcuts were already in my fingers, and I wasn’t spending any budget on remembering how the interface worked.
The results
Same as last time, the results took a full 24 hours. No point refreshing your inbox before then.
96 on both. Passing is 67 for CKS and 66 for CKAD.
That was a relief in the most literal sense of the word. As always, I am thankful to my Lord Jesus Christ for carrying me through it.
If you are a Kubestronaut facing renewal
The short version:
- You only need CKS and CKAD. CARE renews KCSA and CKA off your CKS, and KCNA off your CKAD. Check the current rules on the CARE program page before you plan anything, and make sure all your certifications sit under one Linux Foundation account. If they are split across two accounts the renewal will not cascade automatically and you will have to contact LF Support.
- Book CKS first, even though CKAD probably expires sooner. The harder exam deserves your freshest attention, and it turns CKAD into something close to a victory lap.
- Skip the video re-watch. You are not learning this material, you are reloading it. Go straight to the labs.
- Use killer.sh and one more simulator. killer.sh for difficulty calibration, prepium.sh for volume and variety.
- Practise in the browser, not in your own terminal. The copy-paste and editor friction is a real part of the exam, and you want to have lost that fight at home.
- Leave a week between the two. Long enough to breathe, short enough that nothing goes stale.
Renewal turned out to be a fraction of the work of earning it the first time. I am glad I did not let it lapse.
Resources
- CARE Program, Linux Foundation
- CNCF announcement of the CARE program
- Expanding CARE: CKS now extends CKA
- Kubestronaut FAQ, CNCF
- killer.sh, the official exam simulator, two sessions included with your booking
- prepium.sh, hands-on graded labs, around $29 for 14 days per certification
- K8s Guide, iOS app for adaptive quizzes and curriculum updates