Recently I passed two OpenStack certification exams from Red Hat: EX210 Red Hat Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack exam and the consecutive EX310 Red Hat Certified Engineer in Red Hat OpenStack exam. In this blog post, I’m going to share how I - as a software practitioner - got the job done.

All exams in the Red Hat certification program are purely practical. The first exam EX210 focuses on deployment and administration of OpenStack which includes installation of OpenStack using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director, creating OpenStack users, projects, managing user roles, uploading images into Glance, creating Cinder volumes, adding Neutron networks and launching stacks using Heat. The second EX310 exam includes deploying the Ceph storage on multiple nodes, integrating Ceph with OpenStack Nova, Glance and Cinder and configuring various Neutron resources like networks, load balancers and routers.

To prepare for the exams, I used the online courses Red Hat OpenStack Administration I, II, III ( CL110, CL210, CL310) that are included in my Red Hat Learning Subscription. They covered the exam requirements very well.

I encountered a glitch right when scheduling the exam. As I realized, the OpenStack exams EX210 and EX310 are offered in the selected exam locations only and my San Diego location, where I so far completed all of my Red Hat exams, was not included. Surprise, surprise! However, as I was already planning to visit Prague during my upcoming vacation, I decided to take my exams in Prague, for Prague - as a city of the kings - had the EX210 and EX310 exams available.

As the two OpenStack exams partially overlap, it was a good idea to be preparing for both of them at the same time. I even chose to take the exams on the two consecutive days Thursday and Friday. And how did I score? Well, I made 300 out of 300 points in each of the exams. It could not be any better and I was glad that the sometimes painfully gained experience with OpenStack made itself apparent.

The updated list of my certifications can be found on the Verify a Red Hat Certified Professional website.