CKA Curriculum — v1.35

Fetched: 2026-09-02 Curriculum document: CKA_Curriculum_v1.35.pdf, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) publication Source (authoritative): https://github.com/cncf/curriculum → https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/curriculum/master/CKA_Curriculum_v1.35.pdf

CNCF states in that repository: “The document major and minor version… match the version of Kubernetes”, with the patch version representing documentation iterations for that Kubernetes version. So curriculum v1.35 tracks Kubernetes v1.35.

Re-check this file’s source URL before you book the exam. The curriculum is revised on the Kubernetes release cadence, and the January/February 2025 revision changed the competency list substantially even though the domain weights stayed put.

Domain weights

Note on wording: the v1.35 PDF prints the third domain’s heading as “20% - Servicing and Networking”. Every other CNCF/Linux Foundation surface calls it Services and Networking, and the competencies underneath it are service networking competencies. Treated here as a typo in the PDF; the weight (20%) is unambiguous.

Competencies, transcribed verbatim from the v1.35 PDF

30% — Troubleshooting

• Troubleshoot clusters and nodes
• Troubleshoot cluster components
• Monitor cluster and application resource usage
• Manage and evaluate container output streams
• Troubleshoot services and networking

25% — Cluster Architecture, Installation and Configuration

• Manage role based access control (RBAC)
• Prepare underlying infrastructure for installing a Kubernetes cluster
• Create and manage Kubernetes clusters using kubeadm
• Manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters
• Implement and configure a highly-available control plane
• Use Helm and Kustomize to install cluster components
• Understand extension interfaces (CNI, CSI, CRI, etc.)
• Understand CRDs, install and configure operators

20% — Services and Networking (printed as “Servicing and Networking”)

• Understand connectivity between Pods
• Define and enforce Network Policies
• Use ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer service types and endpoints
• Use the Gateway API to manage Ingress traffic
• Know how to use Ingress controllers and Ingress resources
• Understand and use CoreDNS

15% — Workloads and Scheduling

• Understand application deployments and how to perform rolling update and rollbacks
• Use ConfigMaps and Secrets to configure applications
• Configure workload autoscaling
• Understand the primitives used to create robust, self-healing, application deployments
• Configure Pod admission and scheduling (limits, node affinity, etc.)

10% — Storage

• Implement storage classes and dynamic volume provisioning
• Configure volume types, access modes and reclaim policies
• Manage persistent volumes and persistent volume claims

What changed in the post-2025 revision (and why old guides mislead)

The domain names and percentages are the same as the pre-2025 CKA, which is exactly why stale study guides look correct and are not. The competency list gained items that did not exist in the older curriculum:

• Helm and Kustomize — “Use Helm and Kustomize to install cluster components” (Cluster Architecture)
• CRDs and operators — “Understand CRDs, install and configure operators” (Cluster Architecture)
• Extension interfaces — “Understand extension interfaces (CNI, CSI, CRI, etc.)” (Cluster Architecture)
• Gateway API — “Use the Gateway API to manage Ingress traffic” (Services and Networking)
• Autoscaling — “Configure workload autoscaling” (Workloads and Scheduling)

Community reports consistently flag these five as the weak spots of candidates who studied from pre-2025 material. See retrospectives.

Exam logistics

These figures are widely and consistently reported by community and vendor sources, and by the CNCF study material listed below. They were not read from training.linuxfoundation.org or docs.linuxfoundation.org directly — both domains were unreachable from the network this site was built on. Verify against the Linux Foundation’s own Candidate Handbook and exam page before you rely on any of it.

Budget arithmetic that follows from the numbers above: 120 min ÷ ~17 tasks ≈ 7 minutes per task, including reading the prompt, switching context, and verifying. That single number drives most of the strategy on this site.

Sources

The domain list and every competency bullet above came from the CNCF PDF itself, not from a summary. The logistics table did not.