This is my first time writing a blog post since more than a year. I have been busy with my work and personal life, but I finally found some time to share my experience with the Linux Foundation Certified GitOps Associate exam which I just take today after bought the certificate with a discount from the Kubecon Europe 2025 event. My friend told me about the discount, but I guess you can try to find the updated discount code here. To be honest I have no expectation for this exam, I bought two exams Certified GitOps Associate (CGOA) and Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). Since I have never take the exam from Linux Foundation, I’m thinking to test the water with CGOA first and it was a good decision.
Preparation
My preparation wasn’t something special since I am working with ArgoCD and GitOps in general daily. But in order to know what the exam and questions looks like, I was checking the Domains and Competencies section on the certification page which gave me some information what should I expect the questions will be. If you’re working with Git, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and Kubernetes Operator I can say you’re 50% ready to take the tests.
I bought this mock exam in udemy. It offers around 150-250 questions (due to duplicated questions) around GitOps and toolings such as ArgoCD, Flux, Helm, Kustomize, Sealed Secret, External Secret Operator. But I guess it will cover you to familiarize yourself with the questions. I also watched this youtube video which also covers less abstracted materials.
Exam Day!
The exam was strict but fair, I can’t have my phone, headphone, or any other devices. I need to kill some of the processes on my laptop and use a specific PSI Exam Browser. I need to show my whole room where I take the tests, wearables are checked whether they are smart wearables or not, and this is all explained in order to make sure the test taker are familiar with the test environment. A little tips from me, you might want to test the test environment at least 24 hours before the real exam begins. It will show you how to download the browser, taking the tests, all the requirements before the real test, etc. After testing the test envrionment don’t forget to remove the Test PSI Exam Browser from your machine. You can also start taking the exam 30 minutes before your schedule, you might want to take this 30 minutes so you’re not in a hurry when doing your exam.
It was 60 questions, with a 75% passing grade so roughly (because of the domain weight) you need to have 45 questions answered correctly in around 90 minutes. The questions are asking you a practical questions in a multiple-choices format. If I can summarize, below are the questions type that I got:
- State pull/push method
- Desired States
- Reconciler
- Operator
- Monitoring
- Rollback
- Deployment
- Helm / Kustomize / ArgoCD / Flux / Alertmanager
I believe I shouldn’t publish the questions, so all I can say is it was worth it to buy the mock exam (with a discount, and this is not a sponsored article). The questions are not exactly the same and there’re some materials that is not covered, but it can help you through the exams. So, good luck on your CGOA!
Thank you for reading!