KCNA · CNCF
Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate
CNCF's entry certification, covering the cloud native landscape rather than Kubernetes alone.
CNCF's entry-level certification, and it covers the cloud native landscape rather than Kubernetes alone. Container orchestration is the largest part, but architecture, observability and application delivery are all examined, and the questions about the wider CNCF ecosystem are the ones candidates most often have not prepared for. Note the pass mark: 75%, higher than any AWS associate exam and higher than the Azure fundamentals. On a five-domain paper that margin disappears quickly. The exam costs $250 to sit - two and a half times what AWS charges for a foundational exam, and enough that a resit is worth going out of your way to avoid. Twenty questions here are free, and the per-domain breakdown tells you which of the five is going to cost you.
Who sits this exam
Engineers moving toward container platform work. Worth knowing before you buy: a substantial part of this exam sits outside core Kubernetes, in observability, delivery and architecture.
What it covers
Each domain below is weighted the way the real exam weights it, and scored separately, so you can see which one is holding the total down.
- 01Kubernetes Fundamentals
- 02Container Orchestration
- 03Cloud Native Architecture
- 04Cloud Native Observability
- 05Cloud Native Application Delivery
How you will practise
- Review
- Practice with answers explained immediately.
- Section
- Review one domain at a time.
- Timed
- A timed set with results at the end.
- Final
- The full exam simulation — every question, timed.
What passing proves
That you can read a Kubernetes manifest and explain what it does, and that you know where the surrounding CNCF tooling fits rather than treating it as one undifferentiated stack.