The Golden Kubestronaut badge recognizes an exceptional level of achievement within the Cloud Native ecosystem. Recipients of this badge have demonstrated a sustained commitment to excellence and are recognized as highly accomplished professionals in the field.

Kubestronauts are people who showed exemplary Kubernetes knowledge by passing all five of CNCF’s Kubernetes-related certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) and Kubernetes and Cloud Security Associate (KCSA).

Earners of this designation demonstrated the skills, knowledge and competencies to perform the responsibilities of a Kubernetes Administrator. Earners demonstrated proficiency in Application Lifecycle Management, Installation, Configuration & Validation, Core Concepts, Networking, Scheduling, Security, Cluster Maintenance, Logging / Monitoring, Storage, and Troubleshooting

Earners of this designation demonstrated the skills, knowledge and competencies to perform the responsibilities of a Kubernetes Application Developer. Earners are able to define application resources and use core primitives to build, monitor, and troubleshoot scalable applications and tools in Kubernetes. The skills and knowledge demonstrated by earners include Core Concepts, Configuration, Multi-Container Pods, Observability, Pod Design, Services & Networking, State Persistence.

Earners of this designation are accomplished Kubernetes practitioners (as evidenced by holding the CKA credential). Earners demonstrated the requisite abilities to secure container-based applications and Kubernetes platforms during build, deployment and runtime, and are qualified to perform these tasks in a professional setting.

Earners of this designation demonstrated the skills, knowledge and competencies to perform the responsibilities of a Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate. Earners demonstrated understanding of microservices, containers, CI/CD, IaC, observability, and security, as well as ability to contribute support effectively to scalable and modern platform operations.

Earners of this designation demonstrated comprehension of GitOps patterns including when and why to use them. They also understand the precautions to take around tooling for manifest format and packaging, state store systems, and reconciliation engines to adhere to and extend GitOps principles.

Earners of this designation demonstrated the skills required to do basic to intermediate system administration and are knowledgeable in the operational support of Linux systems and services. Earners can assume responsibility for first line troubleshooting and analysis, and demonstrated proficiency in Essential Commands, Operation of Running Systems, User and Group Management, Networking, Service Configuration and Storage Management.

Earners of this designation demonstrated an understanding of the major features, benefits and use cases offered by Cilium.

Earners of the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate certification know the basic concepts, skills, and use cases associated with open source HashiCorp Terraform. They understand and can utilize Terraform according to the certification objectives. Additionally, they understand why enterprises choose to extend Terraform Community with Terraform Enterprise to solve business critical objectives.

Passing exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions validates the skills and knowledge to combine people, processes, and technologies to deliver valuable products and services that meet end-user needs and business objectives. Candidates optimize practices, improve communications, and create automation to streamline delivery. They design and implement strategies for application code and infrastructure for continuous integration, testing, delivery, monitoring and feedback.

Earning Azure Administrator Associate certification validates the skills and knowledge to implement, manage, and monitor an organization’s Microsoft Azure environment. Candidates have a deep understanding of each implementing, managing, and monitoring identity, governance, storage, compute, and virtual networks in a cloud environment, plus provision, size, monitor, and adjust resources, when needed.

Earning the DevOps Engineer Expert certification demonstrates the ability to combine people, process, and technologies to continuously deliver valuable products and services that meet end user needs and business objectives. DevOps professionals streamline delivery by optimizing practices, improving communications and collaboration, and creating automation.

Earners of this designation demonstrated a solid understanding of the Argo Project ecosystem, terminology, and best practices for each tool and how it relates to common DevOps, GitOps, Platform Engineering, and related practices.

Earners of this designation demonstrated the skills skills and knowledge required to to build developer portals with Backstage. A Certified Backstage Associate (CBA) has the skills to stand up, deploy, and manage a Backstage project as a standalone engineer or team lead.

Earners of this designation demonstrated a solid understanding of Istio principles, terminology, and best practices in order to set up Istio.

Earners of this designation demonstrated advanced proficiency in Kubernetes security, specifically in utilizing Kyverno for defining and managing security policies. Their expertise includes ensuring compliance, actively participating in threat identification and mitigation, and contributing to the overall security resilience of Kubernetes environments.

Earners of this designation understand the basic concepts of observability, and how OpenTelemetry enables these concepts. They understand the fundamentals of OpenTelemetry, how to use its major components, and best practices for instrumenting cloud-native applications for observability.

Earners of this designation demonstrated an understanding of best practices for monitoring cloud native applications and infrastructure using Prometheus, including how to use observability data to improve application performance, troubleshoot system implementations, and feed that data into other systems.

Earners of this designation demonstrated a basic knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, including how to deploy an application using basic kubectl commands, the architecture of Kubernetes (containers, pods, nodes, clusters), understanding the cloud-native landscape and projects (storage, networking, GitOps, service mesh), and understanding the principles of cloud-native security.

Earners of this badge have demonstrated an understanding of the baseline security configuration of Kubernetes clusters to meet compliance objectives, including the ability to harden security controls, test and monitor the security, and participate in assessing security threats and vulnerabilities.