On September 17, I took the beta of the new Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer, CKNE, exam. It was one of the hardest hands-on certification exams I have taken so far. The challenge was not one extremely deep topic, but moving quickly across a broad Kubernetes networking stack within a two-hour time limit.

CKNE combines core Kubernetes networking with Cilium, Istio, Gateway API, security, observability, and newer areas such as inference traffic. Because the exam is still in beta, difficulty and timing may change before the final version.