Flashcards

Seventy-two recall cards drawn from every domain of the CNPE blueprint plus the foundations — served one at a time, the way flashcards are actually meant to be used. Pick a domain, read the question cold, say the answer out loud, then flip. Cards you know drop out of the rotation; cards you fumble come back around. Your progress is saved in this browser, so you can walk away mid-deck and pick it up tomorrow.

Drill the deck

Choose a domain with the chips, then work the card in front of you. Flip to check, then be honest: I knew it removes the card from this rotation for good, Practise again sends it to the bottom of the pile. Everything is keyboard-driven, so you can keep your hands still and your eyes on the card.

Keys: ← previous · → next · Space or Enter flip · K I knew it · A practise again. Keys are ignored while you are typing in the search box, so you can search freely. Your “known” marks live in this browser only (localStorage) — Reset progress clears them everywhere.

How to drill a deck properly

☺ Like you’re 10: Guess before you flip. The guessing is the part that makes it stick — flipping straight over feels faster but teaches you almost nothing.

Flashcards only work when you make yourself retrieve the answer before you see it. Reading a card front and immediately flipping is re-reading with extra steps; the effort of the failed recall is exactly what builds the memory. Two more rules earn their keep for either exam — a performance-based one like the CNPE and a knowledge-based one like the CNPA: answer out loud in a full sentence (if you can’t say it, you don’t know it), and be ruthless about what counts as “known” — a card you half-remembered belongs back in the pile.

Cards are recall, not competence. The CNPE is 120 minutes on a real terminal, so the deck’s job there is to make the vocabulary free — you should never burn exam time recalling what selfHeal does or which probe removes a Pod from Endpoints. The CNPA is 120 closed-book minutes of multiple choice, so the deck’s job there is different: it gives you the vocabulary you need to tell a correct sentence from three plausible neighbours, but not the near-miss discrimination itself. Either way an empty deck is a starting line, not a finish. From here, CNPE candidates go do the matching practice tasks on a real cluster; CNPA candidates go work the four blueprint-aligned practice banks — core, observability & security, delivery, IDPs & measuring — and then a mock set under the clock.

Where to go next

☺ Like you’re 10: Cards tell you what you forgot. These pages are where you go to fix it.

Flashcards are a diagnostic. When a card keeps coming back, the fix is never “flip it again” — it is to re-read the lesson that card came from, then prove it with your hands. Turn the deck into questions with the self-check quiz, look terms up in the glossary, drill the must-know facts on know cold, and when the recall is solid, sit mock exam 1 and mock exam 2 under real time pressure. The blueprint and the exam-day mechanics live in the exam guide.

Match the chip you are drilling to the page that fixes it. Architecture → the lesson, practice · architecture, the architecture lab. GitOps & CD → GitOps and progressive delivery, practice · GitOps, the GitOps lab, and the Argo CD, Flux and Argo Rollouts tool pages. Platform APIs → CRDs and operators, practice · platform APIs, the CRD lab, plus Crossplane and Backstage. Observability → the lesson, practice · observability, the observability lab and Prometheus. Security → security & policy, practice · security, the security lab and Kyverno. The whole hands-on sequence is indexed on the lab track; every command these cards assume you can type lives in the command reference, and when a card sends you back to a symptom rather than a concept, start at the troubleshooting playbook.

Check yourself