In July 2025, I embarked on a journey that would eventually lead me to one of my proudest professional achievements: becoming a CNCF Kubestronaut.
It all started when I passed my CKA. At the time, I had been working full-time as a DevOps Engineer at KPN for about four years. While I loved the work, I knew I wanted to dive much deeper into Kubernetes and the broader CNCF landscape. I realized that to truly immerse myself in these technologies, it was time to switch environments.
Time for a Change Link to heading
A former colleague of mine from KPN had recently moved to TrueFullStaq, and we had kept in touch. Hearing him talk about the engineering culture and the amazing, cutting-edge projects they were working on sparked something in me. I decided to take the leap, leave KPN, and join the team at TrueFullStaq. It turned out to be exactly the catalyst I needed.
The Grind Link to heading
Determined to finish what I started, I continued my certification journey and prep the hands-on way: building and breaking things on my homelab, running K3s on a Raspberry Pi cluster.
I won’t sugarcoat it—the past couple of months have been rough. My routine was completely consumed by early mornings, late nights, and entire weekends dedicated to preparing for the exams.
March 2026 was the final stretch for the hardest exam of the bunch: the CKS. I spent intense study sessions running through complex Falco, Trivy, SBOM, Istio, Cilium and AppArmor scenarios just to make sure I understood the concepts. It was exhausting but incredibly rewarding. I managed to pass the CKS, and I have to admit, I really enjoyed the sysdig and Falco questions.
Even better, the knowledge wasn’t just for the exam. I immediately started implementing these skills at my new job, tightening up SecurityContexts and strictly narrowing down the rights and permissions of our deployments.
Mission Accomplished Link to heading
On April 3rd, 2026, it became official. I officially earned the title of Kubestronaut.
You can check out my official credential here: Credly Badge
Giving Back to the Community Link to heading
I strongly believe in helping and guiding others who are on the same path. Because of that, I have compiled all my resources, study notes, and the example questions I used while prepping.
You can use these resources to test yourself in Killerkoda shells or right on your own homelab. Feel free to use them, fork them, and share them!
- CKS Preparation: CKS-prep Repository
- CKAD Preparation: CKAD-prep Repository
- KCSA Preparation: KCSA-prep Repository
“Don’t communicate by sharing memory, share memory by communicating.”
— Rob Pike (But in this case, I’m sharing my repos!)
Good luck to anyone else out there pursuing their certifications. If you put in the time on your homelab, the results will follow!