federal civilian · defense · the contractors who support them
FOR GOVERNMENT TEAMS
Kubernetes and security certification prep, and the platform skills behind them, for teams that work in federal and other regulated environments — bought on a purchase order, opened to a whole email domain, and reported on in a form a training officer can file.
WHAT DO THESE TEAMS STUDY HERE?
Three things, in one cartridge. The baseline security certification: Security+ is among the certifications recognized in the US defense department's cyber workforce qualification program (DoD Manual 8140.03, which replaced DoD 8570.01-M), which is why federal teams and their contractors so often ask for it. Which roles it qualifies for is set by the program's current qualification matrices.
The Kubernetes papers — CKAD, CKA, CKS — which is what a cleared platform or DevSecOps team is asked for beside it. Every card is tagged to the exam's published domains; the mock is dealt by the same weights; hands-on papers are drilled at a terminal and graded on what the cluster ends up as, not on the keystrokes.
And the skills shelf: the platform stack and the observability skill, built on a generic two-cluster production platform of the kind a hardened cluster runs — delivery by GitOps (Flux), a service mesh (Istio), admission policy (Kyverno), network policy (Cilium), certificates (cert-manager), backups (Velero) and a telemetry collector — for the engineer who is handed one on day one and asked to find what is wrong with it. No vendor's platform is named or copied; the environment is ours and the vocabulary is generic.
The cartridge covers eight exams in all: CKAD, CKA, CKS, KCNA, KCSA, Data Engineer Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, Security+.
HOW IS IT BOUGHT?
By purchase order, as a site license for a twelve-month term, twenty-five berths and up, quoted per order. It is available to US government buyers through SEWP V and OMNIA Partners contract vehicles, or direct by invoice. The license is a key: a crew admin enters it once and every berth runs the full cartridge.
A thirty-day pilot for one team of up to twenty-five is free, so a training officer can read a real readiness board before an order is written.
Individuals and small teams do not need any of this: the cartridge is $29 once for one person, the card-billed crews are on the pricing page, and the first three islands of every exam route are free water either way.
HOW DO PEOPLE GET IN?
By email domain: everyone with a verified address on the licensed domain is in, with no invitations to send and nothing to install — a browser and a sign-in. Single sign-on to the agency's identity provider (SAML or OIDC) can be bound to the license, so the first sign-in through the provider lands inside the crew with every cartridge open.
A crew admin assigns the exam and the exam date to the whole crew, sees who has gone seven days quiet, and can opt in to a Monday digest of the crew's readiness. Members see the shared score board; readiness by exam domain is the admin's.
WHAT DOES THE TRAINING OFFICER GET?
The training record: one CSV of the whole crew — islands and landings cleared per cartridge, readiness and predicted recall at the exam date, cards practiced and holding, mocks and drills sat, the exam sitting if one is recorded, last active — and a per-person PDF of the same figures for the training file. Columns are append-only, so a spreadsheet written against them keeps working.
Readiness here is a number derived from what each person has actually done, never seat time, and a recorded exam sitting is the person's own entry.
WHAT PAPERWORK EXISTS?
An accessibility conformance report against WCAG 2.1 Levels A and AA (the basis of Revised Section 508), drawn criterion by criterion from the rules the product's own test suite enforces, and stated as a self-assessment. A data-handling and subprocessor summary: what is stored per account, what is not (no passwords, no card numbers, nothing typed into a live cluster, no customer system data), who in a crew sees what, and every processor with its purpose and region.
What is not held, said plainly: no FedRAMP authorization and no SOC 2 report. The product stores practice answers and progress and nothing from the customer's systems; the summary is written so a security questionnaire can be answered from it.
The game underneath is the same one every player sails: one ocean, the exams as seas, a helmsman who keeps the log and never explains an answer. Nothing about it is different for a crew of two hundred, except who can read the readiness board.