Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)

Meet an enterprise and cloud architect with 24 years in infrastructure and IT operations, 10 years in private and public cloud, who creates e-learning courses and leads OpenShift deployments.

Explore the CKS syllabus from CNCF, detailing exam topics such as system hardening, supply chain security, and monitoring and logging. Learn to minimize access and secure workloads with mutual encryption.

Explore the CKS course guide, outlining security layers, network isolation, authentication and authorization, secrets management, and container security across Kubernetes environments.

Explore defense in depth with layered security, from infrastructure and network to applications; implement hardening, container image scanning, secrets management, data encryption, ssl, rbac, namespaces, and monitoring.

Learn how to verify platform binaries before deploying by using sha-256 and sha-512 hash functions and host commands to ensure integrity and authenticity of downloads.

Protect node metadata and endpoints by restricting access with minimal-privilege service accounts, disabling exposed metadata when possible, and enforcing private endpoints with TLS, monitoring, and encrypted secrets at rest.

Minimize use and access to GUI elements by restricting the web dashboard with policies and proxies, and adopt declarative infrastructure and pipelines for production environments.

Apply the CIS benchmark to review and harden the security configuration of Kubernetes components, covering file permissions, authentication, auditing, encryption, and secrets management.

Define and enforce Kubernetes network policies to restrict cluster-level access, isolate namespaces, and control ingress and egress traffic using selectors, IP blocks, and CNI plugins like Calico.