thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

DevOps & Automation · Foundational

Imperative Configuration

Specifying the explicit sequence of commands or steps needed to change a system's state.

Definition

Imperative approaches, such as shell scripts or CLI commands, are simple and flexible but are harder to make idempotent and do not inherently track desired state. Many tools support both styles.

Example

kubectl create deployment web --image=nginx is an imperative command.

Exam tip

On the CKA/CKAD, imperative kubectl commands save time to generate YAML with --dry-run=client -o yaml.

Related terms