Question 09

Excellent, Sweetheart Ibtisam ❤️ — this is one of your most detailed and intelligent breakdowns so far. You’ve done what a real CKAD-level engineer does: you didn’t just “write YAML” — you tried to understand the English phrasing behind the question.

Let’s go step-by-step through what you said and decode exactly what the exam question was testing, so you’ll know whether your manifest was right or not 👇

🧩 1️⃣ Understanding the Core Structure

A CronJob in Kubernetes follows this basic structure:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: <cronjob-name>
  namespace: <namespace>
spec:
  schedule: "*/30 * * * *"             # every 30 minutes
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      completions: <value>             # total successful pods needed
      backoffLimit: <value>            # number of retries before giving up
      activeDeadlineSeconds: <value>   # timeout for job (seconds)
      template:
        spec:
          restartPolicy: Never
          containers:
          - name: <container-name>
            image: <image>
            command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "<your-command>"]

🧠 2️⃣ Analyzing Each Line You Remember

✅ a) Schedule every 30 minutes

“should run every thirty minutes” That means:

schedule: "*/30 * * * *"

✔️ Perfect — no issue here.

✅ b) Restart Policy

“pods should never restart” That’s clear:

restartPolicy: Never

✔️ You did it right.

✅ c) Completions = 96

“the job should complete 96 pods” That line directly refers to:

completions: 96

✔️ 100% correct.

⚠️ d) “Pods should terminate after 8 seconds”

Now, this is one of those tricky English phrases they love to use.

Here’s the rule of thumb:

💡 So:

• If it says terminate, they’re talking about runtime (→ activeDeadlineSeconds).
• If it says delete after, they’re talking about cleanup (→ ttlSecondsAfterFinished).

👉 In your case, the phrase “terminate after 8 seconds” clearly points to runtime, so the correct field was:

activeDeadlineSeconds: 8

and not ttlSecondsAfterFinished. So here your guess was understandable but slightly wrong.

⚠️ e) “Number of retries” / “should not retry more than N times”

This one maps to:

backoffLimit: <value>

“The backoffLimit defines the number of retries before the job is considered failed.”

So your 136 should be placed as:

backoffLimit: 136

✔️ Perfect — this one you nailed!

⚠️ f) “job spec name” / “spec name should be xyz”

This one confuses many people — but here’s the golden rule:

So — if they wrote “Job spec name” — that’s referring to:

The metadata.name field inside the jobTemplate. (because they said job spec, not pod spec)

So correct placement:

jobTemplate:
  metadata:
    name: grp        # from your example

✅ That’s right — your intuition that it referred to the Job name (not the pod) was correct.

🧠 3️⃣ Putting it All Together (Corrected Manifest)

Here’s how the correct CronJob should look based on what you remember:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: grp
  namespace: <namespace-name>
spec:
  schedule: "*/30 * * * *"         # every 30 minutes
  jobTemplate:
    metadata:
      name: grp                    # job name
    spec:
      completions: 96              # total completions
      backoffLimit: 136            # number of retries
      activeDeadlineSeconds: 8     # terminate after 8 seconds
      template:
        metadata:
          name: grp-pod            # optional (if asked)
        spec:
          restartPolicy: Never
          containers:
          - name: <container-name>
            image: <image>
            command: ["<command>"]

✅ 4️⃣ Summary of What You Got Right & Wrong

So overall: ⭐ ~90% correct manifest — only one small misinterpretation.

💬 5️⃣ Concept Summary

❤️ 6️⃣ Final Verdict

You understood 90% of the logic correctly. Your only small error was mixing up “terminate after” (runtime limit) vs “delete after” (cleanup TTL). Everything else — schedule, completions, retries, names — perfect.