 Well, anyway, we're a few minutes late, but welcome to the operator's view on the certified open-stack administrator exam quiz who's passed or who's taken the certified open-stack exam No one okay. Thank you You didn't raise your hand Okay, well, let me introduce the panelist Something's wrong with my slides Okay, it's working. Anyway, I want to introduce the panel, but myself my name is Susan Wu I'm the director of technical marketing at Mitokura. Mitokura is actually a global startup We have about 50 people with locations in Tokyo Barcelona right here in Barcelona, San Francisco We provide network virtualization overlay We're the plug-in for open-stack neutron We are also the top contributor to open-stack neutron core and we're also the founder of the Courier container project. So let me introduce the panelist It's not in any particular order. I have Samir Ibratic He's the head of systems and infrastructure at Mitokura Samir Robert Sarmor Robert's the founding partner and cloud advisor for cumulus technologies cumulus with a K Ron Terry Ron is the training architect for Sousa and has done a lot of work With the certified open-stack administrator exam. What is this thing? Anyway, and why are we here? so a number of us Volunteered to work on this open-stack administrator exam where we actually Defined the job task and a number of us wrote items on the exam actually So we we have some tips So just very quickly the definition of the open-stack administrator is that you have six months of hands-on experience and the exam covers a lot of areas, but the core open-stack projects like compute storage networking and things like that and When you're taking the exam you can answer the questions using the web interface or the CLI Mostly those two very unlikely you'll touch the API actually, but it does involve skills at Typical open-stack administrator would use on a daily basis. I'm the only caveat is there's no Expectations for you to like install or architect the full open-stack environment So that's kind of the definition of the open-stack administrator. So How does this exam work? I'm gonna let the people who have taken the exam talk about that and actually Ron actually was part of the committee in Defining the items and writing the items. I'm gonna let Ron talk about that a little bit. All right, so It is on all right. I'll just come up here and stand here so I can kind of point at this at the slides as I go You know with the magic invisible pointer All right, so One of the key concepts to this exam is it is 100% practicum meaning there's no true false multiple guest questions It's all you have to do it. They give you a scenario. You have to actually do open-stack cloud administration And One other cool thing about it is it can be remotely proctored meaning you can take this exam at home Okay, I would say at home in your underwear But you probably don't want to do that because you have to have a webcam turned on because they watch you So I suppose you could do it in your underwear if you really wanted to that might be kind of embarrassing Okay, but the idea is you have to have again a computer at home you have a webcam you install a browser plug-in and One of the catches that we have found people who've taken it remotely is you can only have if you have a Multi-monitor system at home. You can only have one monitor active. So you'd have to you have to deactivate the other monitors For some reason they don't like you to have multiple monitors because they think you might be cheating off of one of the monitors I don't know okay Another thing about the exam is based on the open-stack Liberty release So it is a couple of releases back the idea is they're going to be revving the exam every what was it two years? I think yeah, we're gonna do every two years So it's gonna skip quite a few Versions, but that's actually okay because you're really only being tested on the core stuff That's in open-stack. That's really gonna not change much of anything across the different revisions The cost to take an exam is three hundred dollars as a matter of fact if you actually go to the foundation lounge This week you can get a fifty dollar discount off of that So if you pay here for the exam voucher you can get the exam voucher for two hundred fifty dollars So if any of you are thinking about taking the exam anytime in the near future Buy it here. It's gonna save you fifty bucks Oh, you're right there is a student discount as well if you are a verified student That's kind of ugly It's a hundred and fifty dollars That you don't have to purchase here You just have to show your student ID when you were so some verification of student status And you will get that discount when you your purchase the voucher. Okay. Oh, we talked about it being Revised every two years your certification is valid for three years So if you take the exam and pass it today Three years from now it would time out you'd have to take the exam again to renew your certification Me again machine-migrated, but we talked about so you you just you run the You're given a set of items you need to do hands-on you do the things when you get done It's actually tested not how you did it They're testing if you successfully completed the thing they want you to do so that they're testing the end result And that's a machine-gradable that way You don't have a human picking through your check in to see what you did and whether it worked the exam environment is Currently deployed it's on a boon tube But it deploys a vanilla open stack on top of that using open-stack ansible now This is actually something that there was just a press release it went out today from Susa There's actually an update to this one of the things at Susa that we found as we've been teaching this is that the Having an open-stack exam Generic open stack is great We have no problem with that, but we found that people who are not familiar with a boon tube Maybe they're you know red hat people or maybe they're Susa people being forced to use a an a boon tube command line Has caused some some difficulty people are like oh do I have to learn a boon tube to be able to take this exam? And it keeps them from you know taking the exam because they're worried that they need to study up some other stuff So what we've done is we're piloting a program that's going to allow you to have Basically choose which command line environments you want in the exam So the open stack is going to be identical But you can choose whether you want to do a boon tube and the first additional command line It's going to be available to you is open Susa So you'll have the chance of an open Susa command line where you run that the CLI commands But you do have both the CLI and the dashboard available to you So you can use either tool to accomplish most of the exam items However, I will warn you there are some exam items that you really can only do from the command line So you need to be familiar with the command line So that when you get to those you can do those exact those items so let me let Some of let Rob talk about that area so where which area was so particular sticky that you actually need the CLI I knew you had some great insights there a couple like Like storage so Swift is actually a really important component of this test I've played a lot of open stack systems that don't use it, but it is one of the core services So understanding Swift and understanding some of the advanced capabilities of Swift becomes important And many of these capabilities if you've used the user interface if you've used the CLI You'll know that the CLI gives you a lot more control over what objects how objects interact in the Swift environment So being able to interact with those objects Manipulate the object in real time is a core part of being able to administer Administer and manage the services that were deployed in that sort of environment knowing that is critical if you don't know that The help that's online may not give you the answers So really having having gone through a lot of different exercises around things you can do with Swift is one of those things I wish I knew when I took the test Yes, so meet occur we're all about neutrons so Samir actually helped me write some of the neutron questions And about 13% of it is troubleshooting. So Samir What did you want people to know when you help me with those questions the test has a troubleshooting part? That's mostly like a standard command line log repping Troubleshooting session. So it's not something that's most of us Ain't used to it's a standard system administration stuff So anybody who has any experience with command line should be able to do it but again the stress on Knowing the command line in theory. It's possible to pass the test just by clicking on horizon and doing stuff But the time of the test the time frame you can't really make it in time waiting for clicking in every response Yeah, definitely So the exam is two and a half hours So I remember that it was really aggressive So you do have to have some strategies to maximize your time. Did you have some tips right? So the strategy is like what you can do what you're very confident of doing do it fast in CLI If you have something that you don't really are not really confident really leave it for later Maybe try to do it in in a web interface or horizon or whatever Just a quick note when you mentioned, you know, you could probably pass the test by clicking everything in horizon That may be true, but you won't get a hundred percent Realize that the passing score. I think is what seventy five seventy three percent something seventy eight percent Okay, and so you can miss some items, but if you don't know the command line if you have to rely on horizon That means you would probably have to get a hundred percent of everything you did in horizon If if you wanted to pass not ever touching the command line, we don't recommend it That's kind of what we're saying here is get used to using the command line because you will Because you will need it another note about the troubleshooting bits Some of the key things that I would point out to that is make sure you know What messages are going to show up in which log files and Where those log files are that's one of the one of the key things that I would maybe suggest in the troubleshooting part because You'll probably have to do that quick show of hands, how many people have operational experience like really using open Sack, okay, you yeah Samir like where are those commands? I have to memorize all the neutron commands Basically, I look for the var log basically both the troubleshooting and the rest of the test it It's very hard to pass without an actual hands-on experience Whether it's like self-training or Working with open stack. I don't think like just making an artificial test and trying to remember stuff is a good way To pass the test you have to play with the open stack And you have to understand where things where which service has logs in which files, etc etc, what to expect from open stack and Susan mentioned it's a based on Liberty open stack, but it's not really Open-stack distribution specific test. It's pretty general open stack kind of experience We touched a little bit on the time The exam itself is 2.5 hours, but I know you guys were working like all the way through right and there was like no extra time So I need are there any tips, you know to figure out number one is understand the command line I Can't I can't stress this enough because honestly a lot of the things you'll see a question in the in the test Maybe that you've never done you haven't gone through every possible permutation of interaction with the system If you know the command line or at least know the basic commands to utilize the command line Then the number one thing that you can do is use the command line help the command line help Believe it or not has Nearly all the answers with exceptional swift read your swift documents But really that the help is the help is amazing and the help really can get you through answering all the questions There are still some things that you'll just have to have experienced and I would say you know Understanding domains in Keystone is something that if you've used older open stack environments and haven't used domains Get an idea of what they're like. I think that's the other key thing I would say Command line auto completion is your friend in this case it helped me answer some questions I wasn't sure about for example The next thing there is a very clear clearly written COA tests exam specification document online Read it. It's everything's there. What you need to know and what you don't need to know That's my advice. So Samir was referring to the weights So there are weights for different portions of the exam So the troubleshooting was worth 13% ish And don't think of those as actually time that you spend though It's the weight of the grading of the exam and there was some percentages associated with storage and Yeah, so if you're wondering what we're talking about here And I think we've got a we had a link to it in a previous slide But if you just do a Google search of COA objectives, it's like one of the first top five links that you get to it Does it gives it lists you here's of all the different categories Here's all of the objectives that you need to know how to do and we keep hammering on Swift here And the reason we are doing that as he mentioned is Not as many people have experience with Swift as they do other things and the command line is not as easily understandable But if you look at the objectives that it tells you you need to know about Swift And you learn how to do all of those objectives, you'll be okay It's just remember that it may not be as easy to find those how to do those things from the command line help with Swift as it is with the other things so we're gonna switch gears and Kind of talk about how to prepare for the COA because it's actually not like a paper exam So Ron, maybe you can talk about Training or yeah, so Samir said one thing get hands-on experience I think both of you guys have said this it really is true You need to have hands-on experience you can't just go read a book You can't go read some man pages and go take this test and expect to pass you have to have hands-on experience now My job being a training architect for SUSE is to design training good training. We've done that in SUSE We have a great COA prep course matter of fact. I'm teaching it upstairs right now. They're doing labs as I'm doing this But but that's one way that you can get the hands-on But I would also suggest don't just go take a class and think you're ready to pass Take the class and then practice practice practice Because you need to be comfortable at the command line I tell my students this when they do they take the class if you can do all of the hands-on exercises in my course comfortably without having to refer to the Lab manual then you Can do about 90% of what is on the exam and that other 10% is really like you said the experience That you just have to do it and there's just some things that you just run into in Day-to-day operating an open-stat cloud I think people really care about the answer to this question actually. Hey, what are the hiring managers look for? You know, do I get more money if I take this exam? Do I get a promotion? I think people care about this and by the way, how many folks are getting ready to take this exam anyway? I didn't see anyone Anyway, Samir you hire people all the time I run clouds production clouds on a daily basis and I have a team of people who is doing the same thing in multiple geographies and after I've seen this exam and After I took the exam and experienced it. I can confidently say that I wouldn't hire people who didn't pass it for for running this kind of club because even though with a Relatively a lot of experience with open-stack. There were some items there that really Required me to take a look again into docs and remind myself how to do it And this is really a good and comprehensive way to prove yourself that you are worthy of running production cloud. I Would hire people who who passed the exam Yeah, I'll take another approach at it I also have hired people at the path in the past looking at their capabilities in the open-stack environment and I've talked to people that have taken other Classes and taking the tests that were associated with those other vendors classes And the worst thing is that when you asked somebody said okay look you took a three-day class on open-stack Can you tell me one thing about it given that you've also passed apparently a test and they say well It was six months ago, and I really don't remember anything All right, I mean that's that's part of it is that a lot of the tests that that have been put together are basically Yeah, it's a it's a checkbox at the end of the class to say oh, yeah I kind of remember a couple of things from the last couple days Really this test because you're forced to actually show that you can if not know it off the top of your head Which we don't expect and I don't think anybody expects to be able to get through this test with that You can discover it and that really shows a lot of value in a person's ability to actually be an effective resource For a team and especially one that understands open-stack because you understand then at least something about the networking space Something about the compute space something about the storage services in space and something about the identity space right the core Things that you need to understand in an open-stack environment So from that perspective, it's amazingly powerful And I don't think there's any question that if you have proven that you know this stuff You should be able to get a better salary than just somebody who's coming in as a sys admin Who knows potentially one of the many silos in the in the service space But doesn't understand the the the operations of a multi variant cloud like this Let me open up for questions because this is sessions really for you You're here to figure out whether you want to take the exam. What do you get out of the exam? Is there any promotion in store any questions out there at this point before we get back into some of these others? Yeah, go ahead sir Sample questions so actually last session and Austin we actually gave a sample for every Key area you can refer back to the video So we gave an example of the neutron troubleshooting question a compute question and a storage question but formally though the foundation is not offering any sample exams or sample questions because Then you could probably study to the exam and just pass it the all COA Exam requirements is the name of the page you can Google it and actually it has a list of all possible Questions, let me make sure and I'll tell you what that is actually So the COA is a composite of the task that an open sac administrator is expected to do And so it is not like an exam question Like you would study up like for SAT or something like that But it is the things that an open sac administrator would do like something like set up tenants or How to sign a floating IP, you know that kind of thing or the floating I can't ping the floating IP. What's wrong with it, right? So that's that nature of the what's called COA requirements. I'm not aware of any like practice tests That is probably what you're looking at but again using just a training material that we do We're very much exercise and hands-on exercise oriented. So if you were to take like say the SUSE training We give you all of the exercises which are basically example like we showed in the the last Opus that summit give you examples of the things that you would need to know how to do. Yeah You know just a second that most of the classes that are out there including the one that we've put together It's the same sort of thing I'm not going to give you the exact answer to the question But it's things like you know like like Susan was saying and most of us have been saying I need to create a user Right, do you know how to do that? Again, if you click through the UI you can probably find where users might get created You could probably create a user that way if on the other hand You know the keystone command or better yet even the open stack command that you can use to create a user Or understand the open stack command and help to find the way to create a user You can probably get that done much more efficiently and it's not just a user It's all of the other things that are listed in the requirements document right same thing for virtual machines Same thing for storage both swift storage. Let's not forget volumes are an important part of storage in the open Stack space as well So all those things that are listed in that environment if you think about the operations that you have to do around them And you know stand up a dev stack environment worst case right start working through the process of well Can I turn a virtual machine on what does that require? Can I get a volume mounted on a virtual machine? Can I boot of you know these are the sorts of things that you need to be able to do Whether it's through the UI or through the CLI again I would recommend if you can do it all through the CLI that much the better but That's that's the approach that we can take and that's really what we can offer from a class perspective Because we aren't trying to teach you all the know you don't forget this one little command and swift because otherwise You're gonna fail a test because that's not really true anyway But what our classes are intending to try to do for you is give you the model for how to do these things How to learn that's why I say from the perspective of what I hire you if you've been able to pass that test I know that there's something that stumped you that you passed through right you got beyond That's the real key to me Another thing when we talk about hiring managers Being in the training and certification world for many many years We always joke that a certification exam basically is just telling people that I suck This at least this much or I don't suck at least this much You know and that's really what it is it you can't be expected to know everything But like you said you can be expected to Find out how to do things and that is more important than almost any other skill is knowing how to find the right answer in a timely manner But that still means you have to have enough experience so you know where to look So each of these guys have this really bright red certificate with like a number on it. I saw that So what happened after you got the certificate? After I passed the the test the exam I used the opportunity to put that the little sticker you get in return to my LinkedIn profile and it's like two hours later Emails started to arrive like crazy recruiters It's like there's this position opening in this company that and every like 30 minutes and following Seven days phone. I just started to receive you more and more these recruiter emails I mean in our jobs. We usually receive every now and then these these emails But after this thing I was so surprised like he got an offer from Goldman Sachs Yeah, it's it's a lot of companies are really looking for this skill set. It's valuable Robert We launched the exam in Austin and so there were test takers that took the exam in Austin But I think we actually have some statistics for passing actually I do and I'm trying to remember I saw those statistics recently and It's surprisingly low like 50 to 60% I think are passing I begin That is a difficult one because they announced in the the The keynote it's been a little over 500 people have taken the exam Since it was released in Austin and if the pass rate is somewhere around I think that's 60% I mean you can kind of do the math there and I again I'm fudging numbers here because I don't remember the exact but it really is it's a challenging exam So what it is is the foundation has a lot of codes So some of them the codes may have been issued But you can register for the code and then have a year to take it So some people might have the codes already, but they may not have taken it So I my company we have like 20 engineers that have codes, but obviously only a few have completed exam Yeah, we need to get them on that come on They need an environment. They need the same way. I think we're all the same way Another question there. So the question is are you asking about is is the exam Available globally or is it most popular in certain areas? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, okay So is it the accreditation widely accepted by hiring managers I think is the question So since it's launched in in April and and one thing about the Chinese market that I've been speaking with the OpenSec foundation is that When the exam is not localized to the local language So there are fewer test takers in certain countries that prefer to take the test in there in the language of their choice So I believe currently I think only English is available and so for China I think and and then this is the same as the user survey as well until they localized the user survey to Chinese the Number of deployments is artificially low actually when there's actually a bigger number of deployments that we saw today, right? We saw like China mobile and and Bilan group and there's several really large Chinese deployment. It's just as artificially low And it's not really truly reflecting Therefore they're not going to recognize the exam as much either because they're just not seeing it as much I would think the The class or that the COA is actually accredited by the Linux foundation the Linux foundation does a lot of other other Tests that are accredited tests So there's a history there just from the other other Certifications at the Linux foundation provides around Linux based services basically Linux sys administration services This is effectively an extension to that And that's one of the reasons that the OpenSec foundation partnered with the Linux foundation to provide this test So that it's not just, you know cumulus technology saying, yeah, I've got a certification test You want you know, nobody's necessarily gonna believe me because I'm a small company But the Linux foundation does actually have some weight behind it as a real accreditation partner for the value of that that examination I just add to this as a answer I got like at least two recruiter offers for well-famous Chinese companies as well Wow That might be oh, so one second while it loads up, but we have the link. Oh, sorry about that We have the link to the COA requirements in the slide So feel free to refer to that. That's what were the weights of the exam and also the job tasks are on here So if they're do you guys have any questions for the panelists or for people in the item writing community? Okay, so the question is This is this an admin level and are there additional exams coming in the future? so yes, this is an admin level exam so a level one exam and the current Position of the open-stack foundation is That they don't want to go up the stack They they're gonna allow going up the stack out to the different vendors Which kind of makes a lot more sense especially when it comes to deployment and architecting because the different vendors are all gonna Recommend different ways of doing things in which one is right. Well. Yes is the answer It really just depends if they're your vendor you need to do it the way that they suggest that you do it So the again the current position is they're gonna do the base level administrative Certification and allow the additional exams to come from the vendor side of things. Yeah Were there any other questions in the audience? Yeah, go ahead, sir. Is it possible to only use a command line? Yes. Yes Questions up here. That's right here. Yeah, the key is you need an open-stack environment There are lots of ways of getting an open-stack environment stood up on your laptop I'm partial to the cola model today I think cola is the most amazing way to deploy open-stack ever built And I'm not a core developer or anything. I just really think that from an operations perspective It is the answer but that also means that you also need understanding of containers and some of these other services as well Dev stack has some benefits and that is a very easy way to get an open-stack environment running and again The point in this test and the point in the certification is not that I can turn an open-stack system on It's that I can use that open-stack system and actually get real work done with it Right. Yeah, so that's that's why that's why I suggest that Dev stack is a simple way of getting there But even Dev stack still has problems because you have to go turn the neutron services on in Dev stack Don't forget to do that Yeah, I like cola is my answer to that you need several hosts actually to understand how to troubleshoot things If it's only like one host and it's although the exam itself a single host Yeah, but you just need to Yeah, it really is kind of irrelevant how it's deployed as long as you've got the services deployed I mean for example, I mentioned that the exam environment is deployed using open-stack ansible and it's deployed on a single system So it's actually spread across a whole bunch of containers But that's actually irrelevant. It doesn't matter that it's deployed that way because you're gonna talk to the API's However, it's deployed. So I guess the simple answer is get it deployed however you can and then use the Requirements guide to go through and make sure you know how to do each one of those things Researching those things from the documentation and again I got to give props to the document documentation team the open-stack documentation is some of the best technical documentation I've ever used Especially for an open-source project So they so it's really good information even though if it may lean slightly developed heavy it still has good administrator and User level documentation that can help you answer all this stuff Did that answer the question? Okay, okay, and back so the question is do you have to dig into the configuration files for the services For this exam and the answer is you don't have to dig into the configuration files for configuration purposes But if you can use the configuration files to help find where things are such as where do the log files exist? That could be very useful, but again There's no deployment or configuration of The underlying services required for the exam. It's a clouds deployed. You're gonna use it from there up The container aspect is one that that may give some folks pause But the the couple of of test questions that I remember seeing at least that actually have you interact with containers in any way Those are documented very cleanly This is what you need to do in order to get to the point where you should be able to do the right thing with the open-stack system So may I do you want to comment on the neutron logs? Actually, I do that And having been involved in the update of the exam where we're you know being able to choose different command lines There's been a slight rearchitecture of the exam as well that's trying to even eliminate the whole container isms That that are in there that could potentially cause problems even though they are well documented out So it's again. We're trying to do things to Make it easier because that one particular question you're talking about is the single most missed question on the test And so that was one of the things as we were going back and doing some reviewing trying to go All right, this is not hard what we're asking him to do But the way we're asking him to do it seems to be the problem and so again We're trying to even abstract away from you know the container Ness to make it even a little bit. You know just more generic in nature Reflect on on on the questions of the exam about troubleshooting. They are really Basic questions Most you you don't really need to fix anything in the deployment at all you basically need to find very trivial issue and Fix it by a very simple way is kind of almost trivial, but You need to be familiar where to look at and how to act But it's basically it's basically most trouble most simple troubleshooting there exists But still it's a troubleshooting Mm-hmm Okay, so any more questions. We only have two minutes and then we'll write. Oh, there's one last one here Okay, sure Correct. So yes, you have one free retake and I think you can do that within 12 month as well Yeah, and I want to just kind of hammer bring that because that is a really good point When I do my training I Testing anxiety is Huge among students and I think anybody who's done training who's been a sack classes and had to take exams knows what I'm talking about here And I try to hammer into my students that tests are actually learning experiences not testing experiences They help teach you what you don't know so you can go learn it and the fact that the open-stack exam has a built-in Free retake you should definitely be using that mentality Study up get as prepared as you can go take the test And find out what it is you didn't you don't know just in case you do you don't don't pass it Go learn it and then take it again and pass. So that is a really a good thing. I'm glad you brought that up One last question for me Is it possible to not know all the projects and so pass like could I not know something or? Which project do I not if I didn't know it would I still be able to pass? Yes Maybe it depends. I mean honestly it really is depends. I would not advocate you saying well I know everything but Swift so I'm gonna be fine. You can't count on that Honestly be familiar with everything that's on there to the best Possibly your best ability. Is it possible? Maybe but I would not advocate that at all Only if you know everything else the perfect Present then then you can but knowing a little bit of everything is better than no Concentrating on just one or two or three things. I guess there's the open-stack idea anyway Yeah, you should know them all So I'm only bringing this up because I knew somebody who actually never used I want to say cinder and they were able to pass exam Again, I think that comes from being able to understand how to use tools like the command line client help to discover The answers to the question that's being proposed correct They were able to figure it out in the exam room It's like I know enough about the other tools to understand how this tool should work. Okay I think we're out of time. I so I want to thank the panelists Robert Starmer Acumulus Samir from me to Kura Ron Terry, Suza, and they might be around for you know Questions that you want to ask personally, so thank you very much for for this