How to Ace (CGOA) Certified GitOps Associate Exam
Introduction
So want to pass CGOA exam but not sure where to start? don’t worry will help you what to pay attention and will share my experience I had been part of beta tester for CGOA and contributed on creating exam, can say from both side what to look for and what are overall is expecting from candidate who will pass it, but first let’s start from the format of the exam and difficulty level.
Who should take this exam?
Certified GitOps Associate is entry level certification compared to CKAD/CKA/CKS it is multiple choice 90-minute exam also it is online proctored exam keep in mind also it is much easier compared to them would say it is on pare with KCNA/KCSA, the main theme of this exam is to emphasize open GitOps standard and give candidate understanding of concepts, structuring repositories and general patterns what to look for and keeping everything in vendor neutral format which was hard part cause some times mentioning during discussion which tool is best ArgoCD or FluxCD could cause hot debates…
Lets discuss the Certification Domains & Competencies
**GitOps Terminology 20%**
Continuous
Declarative Description
Desired State
State Drift
State Reconciliation
GitOps Managed Software System
State Store
Feedback Loop
Rollback
**GitOps Principles 30%**
Declarative
Versioned and Immutable
Pulled Automatically
Continuously Reconciled
**Related Practices 16%**
Configuration as Code (CaC)
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
DevOps and DevSecOps
CI and CD
**GitOps Patterns 20%**
Deployment and Release Patterns
Progressive Delivery Patterns
Pull vs. Event-driven
Architecture Patterns (in-cluster and external reconciler, state store management, etc.)
**Tooling 14%**
Manifest Format and Packaging
State Store Systems (Git and alternatives)
Reconciliation Engines (ArgoCD, Flux, and alternatives)
Interoperability with Notifications, Observability, and Continuous Integration Tools
As we see big percentage is given to general Principles and Patterns/Terminologies as it is crucial to understand in which problem does GitOps help us and where does it site in our Continues Deployment and how does it differs from traditionally deploying applications and CI/CD.
From experienced person who has been using GitOps for while it could be intuitive and majority questions should be related from day-to-day tasks which they had performed but what if we are new to all this jazz? in such case we need to fill our gaps and deep dive in world of cloud native ecosystem and GitOps, the best place to start exploring would be documentation of Open GitOps
This four Pillars are fundamentals similar to “10 commandments” based on this principles the whole philosophy is built around which is share across all GitOps tools sound like cult isn’t it? joke aside but this approach and consistency helped to shape current approaches how we do delivery of our deployment and management component in most simple and easy way on large scale which fit well in Kubernetes ecosystem
okay at this point we are excited and want to rush into the exam but from where should start preparing and especially when wo do not have experience?
the documentation is our best friend and let’s start with the most first tools which start this whole GitOps and Progressive deliver movement I am speaking about FluxCD I would say it has great introduction to general concepts and patterns how to structure GitOps delivery and can say person who has been working with Flux V1 and V2 this documentation has seen very big progression over the time and was one of my most reference point, second great documentation of course is ArgoCD and third documentation which I would recomend is from Jenkins X beside documentation Linux Foundation provides also Free training materials which are good addition if we want something paid nice place it to check kodekloud catalog with there ArgoCD Course also to practice before taking exam would recommend to check Codefresh bage test and materials for ArgoCD, GitHub is also good place to check for repos such as this one.
What if you more prefere to what videos in this case I would recomend one of my favorite CNCF youtube channel they always upload lates conferences videos from kubecon or gitops con so highly recommend to check on them but do not get stuck in youtube rabbit hole remember practice is everything and not watching someone else but where could we practice in this case I would highly recommend to check Killerkoda playground and scenarios regarding materials would say it should be enough, one recommendation which I can give is before starting whole this journey take some target day for exam and schedule it for yourself have timeline and urge to study seriously from my experience it helped me.
So it is exam day how will it look like? all Linux foundation and CNCF certifications are online proctored before exam hour before check all prerequisites and ensure PSI browser plugin is installed before 30 min you would see join button would recommend to start your exam early cause there is always some issues, saying this as person who has passed more then 15 PSI proctored exams there is something new always in room we should not have any posters or white board, the desk should be clean and nothing extra should be on if you are doing from laptop only laptop if from PC keyboard and mouse no pen, notebook or anything proctors are very serious on this remember that you could have glass water keep it the exam is long 90Min but the most important is to have good chare couple time I was doing exam from my kitchen and it was not comfortable at least, when exam will be finished after 24 hour you will know your score the passing one is >75% and you will receive creadly certificate
At this point congrats you have passed and obtained certification hope this post was informative and would encourage to learn more and take bigger challenges as there are many certifications from Linux Foundation, CNCF and CD foundation, remember to stay curious and share you knowledge with others 🚀
