How to Pass the KCA Exam

KCA-specific tips and the most common pitfalls.

KCA exam tips

• Policy structure questions often ask you to identify what a given YAML policy does — practice reading policies and tracing their match conditions.
• Preconditions vs match/exclude logic: understand when to use each. A common question type.
• For generate rules, understand when resources are generated: on a trigger resource creation, not on the generated resource itself.
• Policy reports (PolicyReport, ClusterPolicyReport) are Kubernetes CRDs — know their structure and how to query them.

Common KCA pitfalls

• Confusing Audit and Enforce policy modes — Audit logs but allows; Enforce blocks. A critical distinction.
• Skipping the verify-images rule type as "advanced" — image verification questions appear in the exam and the rule structure is distinct from validate/mutate.