Is Hackademy a CKA or CKAD exam simulator?

No. It is a practice simulator for Kubernetes incidents and is not affiliated with the Linux Foundation or the CNCF. The Linux Foundation includes access to the killer.sh exam simulator with each CKA and CKAD registration.

Which exam is closer to what the missions cover?

Most missions are about running and fixing workloads, which is the heart of the CKAD and of the CKA's troubleshooting, networking and workloads domains. The CKA's cluster installation and maintenance tasks are not simulated.

Do I need an account to practise?

No. You can play some missions in each simulator without one. A free account keeps your stars and XP and opens every mission.

Practising for the CKA and CKAD with a Kubernetes simulator

By Hackademy. Updated 14 October 2026. Output from a real Kubernetes v1.35 cluster.

The short answer

The CKA and CKAD are hands-on exams: you solve tasks on real clusters from a terminal, in two hours, so speed and accuracy with kubectl matter more than theory. A simulator helps with the part most people find hardest, which is diagnosing and fixing a broken workload under time pressure. The Kubernetes Simulator's missions cover troubleshooting crash loops, failed probes and out-of-memory kills; Deployments, rollouts and rollbacks; Jobs and CronJobs; Services, DNS, Ingress and NetworkPolicy; ConfigMaps, Secrets and resource limits; RBAC, namespaces and quotas; scheduling with labels, taints and affinity; and persistent volumes. It does not install or upgrade clusters, back up etcd or give you a real node to log in to, so practise those on a cluster of your own. Hackademy is not affiliated with the Linux Foundation or the CNCF, and it is not an exam simulator: registration for either exam includes access to the killer.sh simulator.

What the exams test

Both exams are run by the Linux Foundation with the CNCF. As of October 2026 its pages list these domains and weights. The CKA is based on Kubernetes v1.35, the version the simulator's output is captured from; the CKAD is based on v1.37.

CKA: Troubleshooting 30%; Cluster Architecture, Installation and Configuration 25%; Services and Networking 20%; Workloads and Scheduling 15%; Storage 10%.
CKAD: Application Environment, Configuration and Security 25%; Application Design and Build 20%; Application Deployment 20%; Services and Networking 20%; Application Observability and Maintenance 15%.

How the missions line up with the CKA

Troubleshooting: the REST API app (a crash loop, readiness probes, an out-of-memory kill), the Payments service (a slow starter, a pod with no shell, a bad release mid-rollout) and the daily incidents.
Cluster architecture and configuration: the Multi-team platform app covers namespaces, RBAC for a CI robot and an on-call engineer, and resource quotas. Installing, upgrading and backing up a cluster are not simulated.
Services and networking: the Microservices shop covers Services and cluster DNS, target ports, Ingress, NetworkPolicy for ingress and egress, a NodePort and an ExternalName.
Workloads and scheduling: the Static website (Deployments, scaling, rollouts and rollbacks), the Batch pipeline (Jobs and CronJobs) and the Node fleet (labels, taints, resource requests, draining, anti-affinity, topology spread, node affinity and priority).
Storage: the Multiplayer game server covers StatefulSets with persistent volume claims, node-local storage, reclaim policies and binding a claim back to a released volume.

How the missions line up with the CKAD

Application environment, configuration and security: ConfigMaps, Secrets and a rotated password in the REST API app; RBAC and quotas in the Multi-team platform.
Application design and build: Jobs, retries, parallel work and CronJobs in the Batch pipeline; init containers and volumes elsewhere in the catalogue.
Application deployment: rolling updates, kubectl rollout undo, a one-server canary and a release paused mid-rollout.
Services and networking: the whole Microservices shop app.
Application observability and maintenance: kubectl logs, describe, events, probes and kubectl debug on a container with no shell.

What to practise somewhere else

A simulator is deliberately narrower than a cluster. Use a real one, such as kind or minikube on your own machine, for anything that needs a node or a control plane:

Installing a cluster with kubeadm, upgrading it and backing up or restoring etcd.
Logging in to a node, reading kubelet logs and fixing a broken control plane component.
Interactive shells in containers (kubectl exec -it): the simulator runs a handful of one-off commands instead.
Working fast in the exam's own environment, which the killer.sh sessions included with registration are built for.

Practise it on a simulated cluster

These missions in the Kubernetes Simulator break a cluster in this way and leave you to fix it. Free in your browser, nothing to install.

Start CrashLoopBackOff

Questions

Is Hackademy a CKA or CKAD exam simulator?: No. It is a practice simulator for Kubernetes incidents and is not affiliated with the Linux Foundation or the CNCF. The Linux Foundation includes access to the killer.sh exam simulator with each CKA and CKAD registration.
Which exam is closer to what the missions cover?: Most missions are about running and fixing workloads, which is the heart of the CKAD and of the CKA's troubleshooting, networking and workloads domains. The CKA's cluster installation and maintenance tasks are not simulated.
Do I need an account to practise?: No. You can play some missions in each simulator without one. A free account keeps your stars and XP and opens every mission.