 Today's discussion will talk about the new or the newly upgraded certified OpenStack Administrator exam, the COA exam, available starting today, October 17th. The upgraded version of the COA exam is based on the OpenStack Rocky release, among other changes, and it is provided to you in collaboration between the OpenStack Foundation and Merantis. Now the COA is the only OpenStack certification offered by the OpenStack Foundation as well. It is supported by a worldwide ecosystem of vendor-neutral training partners. Merantis being one of those vendor-neutral training partners. So this session, this presentation, is designed to give you the information you need related to the new upgraded COA exam. Let's get started. First, a very brief intro to who I am. My name is Paul Quigley. I work for Merantis as a curriculum developer and trainer, primary focus being on OpenStack. So that's why I'm here to talk to you about the COA exam. I've been in the cloud for about 10 years, so a little after it started, and I've been working on OpenStack for around seven years. So I've seen many changes to OpenStack over that time frame, and I've seen it grow into a very mature, very viable cloud platform as a result. The COA is provided to you in collaboration between the OpenStack Foundation and Merantis. The goal is to give you a vendor-neutral exam for the entire OpenStack community. What will we talk about today? Well first, we're going to talk about what the COA exam is. Then we're going to look at the new or the upgrades to the COA and what's different. Some of that will blend into what the new COA covers, what tasks, what topics, what skills, and then we'll discuss how do you prepare for the COA. Where can you go for training for example? What should you expect during the COA, during the actual exam, and we'll show you some sample screen captures to kind of get you familiar with the environment before you take the exam. And then lastly we'll end up with tips and some useful resources. In conjunction with this presentation, I've also written a blog which is being posted to the Merantis website with several tips in there. So let's start off very beginning. What is the COA? The COA, the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam, offers you a career path based certification as an OpenStack professional. What does that mean? Once you are certified and you pass the exam, that tells others in the industry that you have a certain set of skills. So they understand they being everybody else in the industry whether it's a hiring manager or a colleague or a customer that you are going to work with regarding OpenStack. They understand that you have a certain skill set. The exam is performance based. You'll be given a series of tasks to execute and the goal is to test your baseline skills or another way of looking at it is your skills with the core components of OpenStack. Now the exam isn't for everyone. You need to understand OpenStack before you take the exam. If you don't know anything about OpenStack, it doesn't make sense to take the exam. So you need to have some experience and the guidelines are six months of experience. So a minimum of six months of experience using OpenStack day-to-day to operate and manage a cloud. You might be able to pass the exam with less experience with the help of taking a class for example. So that is another possibility. The class can be used to supplement your existing knowledge but you really need to understand how to use OpenStack for example and how to use it to operate and manage an OpenStack cloud. What are we talking about? We're talking about one of these. This is a big thing. Okay, this is not just something that somebody decided oh this is a good thing to do. No, this is an industry-wide recognized certification. It tells coworkers, colleagues, customers, everyone that you have a certain set of skills by passing the exam. Why take the COA? Well, it's industry-recognized, well-recognized within the industry. It's been around since about the middle of 2016, so about three plus years. It's a skills-based exam and you are tested against a standard set of skills or tasks to use OpenStack to manage and operate the cloud. It proves you know what you're doing and you have a certain skills expectation, level of expectation for those skills. Being vendor-neutral, it takes that level of expectation up another notch, so to speak. It proves that you can use and administer any OpenStack distribution. So if you're familiar with OpenStack, you can get a distribution from any number of vendors, one of any number of vendors. Those distributions have additional value add code added in. So the COA, being vendor-neutral, says that you can use and administer any OpenStack distribution, even one that you might install yourself. That's the level of expectations you're giving to your customers, your colleagues, etc. You can look at it another way. Having the COA certificate assures that, for example, I have a certain skill set, knowledge, background, experience, competency to perform the tasks and responsibilities of OpenStack system administrators. So what is different for the new COA? What's different than in the past? Well again, the COA is back as of today, October 17th. It continues the history or the legacy of being vendor-neutral, and it's provided to you in collaboration between the OpenStack Foundation and Merantan. There are several ways you can purchase or buy the exam. You can go out to the OpenStack website, and that has now been modified as of today. You can enroll in the COA now, or you can go through any number of the OpenStack training partners. Additionally, I'll show you in a slide or two what I'll call the COA events page. That will show you the schedule, and you can use that to see when the exams are scheduled, and you can enroll on that page as well. So there's several different ways to do this. What is different? It's still a live online exam. The duration is three hours. Being online, you can take it anywhere in the world. Just don't take it at your local coffee shop. The reason for that is you want to be in an environment that's quiet, where you are the only one, and so on. So a coffee shop is not going to help in that case. But it'd be nice. You can choose one of the pre-scheduled sessions listed on the URL, the coa.arlo.co. That's what I refer to as the COA events URL. So you can go out to that URL and see when the exams are scheduled, and enroll in the exam there as well. The sessions will be available in the United States, EMEA, and APAC, and friendly times in those regions for you. Any session that's posted is guaranteed to run, and what that means is if you sign up for it, that exam will run on that date at that time. A little bit more details. The exam is based on Ubuntu 1804 and OpenStack Rocky. Google Chrome currently or initially is the supported browser. We will update that to support, for example, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge over time, and those will be coming soon. But initially, you will need the latest level of Google Chrome to take the exam. The exam itself is a start from scratch set up. So basically what that means is you'll have an OpenStack environment with the various components, Nova, Keystone, Glance, etc., and then you will execute tasks to define the users, the projects, the quotas, the images, the networks, and so on. But you need to be familiar with that type of operation and administration. There are 23 tasks in the exam. As you go through them, they can typically be done from either the command line client, that OpenStack command, or the Horizon dashboard UI. If you're familiar with OpenStack, the dashboard is a little bit easier to use in a lot of cases. So that might be your preferred choice, and usually for most folks it is. There might be some tasks that say use the command line for this task or these next several tasks. So you need to be sensitive to that. You'll lose points if you use the UI when the task says use the command line. We'll talk about what those tasks are, what you need to know in a couple of seconds when we look at the domain knowledge requirements. Those have changed slightly from the previous COA as well. Perhaps the biggest change is that during the exam you are no longer allowed to access the OpenStack docs or the OpenStack documentation. So what does the upgraded or new COA cover? Well, we're still talking about the core components with Keystone for identity, Nova for compute, Glance for images, and so on. We'll break that down by component on some of the tasks that you should be familiar with. And you can also go out to the OpenStack website and click on the requirements link and see the same basic information we're going to cover in the slides. Using either the dashboard horizon or that command line client you will be required to execute tasks related to the core services Keystone, Nova, Glance, Neutron, Cinder, Swift, etc. Let's start looking at some of that now. You should know how to use the dashboard UI and the OpenStack command line client. You need to understand both, both the dashboard UI, the horizon component, and the OpenStack command line client. When I say OpenStack command line client again I mean the OpenStack command. For some tasks you'll be expected to use only that command line client. The good news is not many folks use REST API calls, that's not part of the exam. So you don't need to understand how to use the REST API. Continuing with what skills you should understand let's look at Keystone identity management first. About 15% of your exam will be based on creating and managing domains, projects, users, roles, understanding the difference between the roles, and further updating the policy files that control what you can and can't do the operations against resources. So you need to understand those tasks as well as how to build or create the RC files for the command line client, for the command line usage. So you need to understand what an RC file is, what its purpose is, how do you create one, etc. From a NOVA perspective compute services. Typical stuff, flavors, instances, SSH keys. So you'll need to understand how to create an SSH key and how to use it to SSH into an instance. Then you'll also need to look at and understand floating IP addresses and security groups and how they apply or how you use them with the instances and so on. You can read the list, I'm only highlighting certain parts of the list. Images, about 5%, the glance component. You'll need to understand how to upload a new image into the image repository and how to manage those images and know what's the difference between public and private and metadata and so on. Object storage, the Swift component. You should be familiar with using the command line to upload and manage files to Swift containers and then managing permissions on those containers, for example. Neutron, the network service, about 30%. You should be familiar or have the knowledge to be able to create networks, subnetworks. What's a public network? What's a project or private network? Create the router, connect the router to the networks and so on. Along with that, you should be able to, you should be familiar with creating security groups and rules and applying those against instances. Same thing applies to floating IP addresses. You might be asked to create a floating IP address and assign it to an instance and use it to SSH into that instance, for example. Block storage or volume service, cinder, about 10%. You should know how to create and manage volumes and attach them to instances, manage quotas, etc. How do you prepare for the COA? The exam environment is going to use a web browser, so you need to have Google Chrome at the latest version. And again, later on, not too far from now, we will add additional browsers into there for the support. So we're looking at Mozilla Firefox as well as Microsoft Edge, for example. You'd have internet access. You are required to have a working webcam and microphone because you might be asked, for example, by the proctor to use your webcam and pan around the room so they can see you don't have cheat sheets taped to the wall or on your workspace, etc. Be prepared. You might be asked to do that and pan around the room so nobody else is in the room. There is a hardware compatibility tool. You see the link for it there. I strongly suggest that you run that tool before the day of the exam. Don't wait till the day of the exam. Don't wait till right before you sign into the exam. If you have errors, you'll need to fix them. So you may have some ports there are blocked by a firewall. You'll need to get that addressed and the day of the exam is probably not going to be beneficial to get that fixed. Run the tool from the machine. You're going to take the exam on connected to the network that you're going to take the exam. You will need a clean workspace so no obstructions overhead where you might have something some hints and tips or cheat sheets or anything underneath. You need to have a pristine clean workspace and we'll talk about some of this a little bit more as we go through the guidelines. The compatibility tool will produce a report similar to what you see here. So run that tool and check your connectivity. The status should come back okay for all of the ports. Again, don't wait till the day of the exam. Do it in advance of that and do it from where you expect to take the exam. Don't run it from home if you're going to take it in a private room in the office so to speak. You need to make sure you do it from the same location. Okay a few guidelines for during the exam. The main change like I said earlier you are not allowed to access the online help so any external web page including the OpenStack docs is not allowed. No email clients no other internet browsers open no other tools no other communication with any other candidates or outside resources. No outside resources means nobody else in the room. No notes no no page no documentation no course manuals no external devices or smart glasses or watches or anything like that. And again no other person can be in the room. If you are taking the exam from the office and you're in a what's what the typical office environment is now where you're in an open workspace it's not going to be quiet you will have other people around that's not an appropriate environment so you will need to move to a quiet room where you can close the door and it is just you. That's an overview of the guidelines. There are more strongly worded guidelines in the COA student handbook and you've got the URL on the slide as well so you want to make sure you read the handbook as well. This slide is not all encompassing with what you can and what you can't do. Let's shift gears now and talk about what to expect during the exam. When you start your exam proctor will send you a link that link will take you to what's called a registration page. This is the top half of that registration page. All of the fields are required so fill them in and then scroll down and you'll see the second half of that screen and it's basically reiterates this is a closed book exam three-hour time limit etc etc and then you have to physically check each of those boxes to say you don't have a cell phone or any internet capable device camera etc. If you're in a room with other people in a group taking the exam you will focus on your own test no internet browser access or any other tools no talking you can read through that list but you need to check each of those boxes and then click register. The last item in the list clearly states that any violations of the rules will force you to be kicked out of the exam with a fail-in grade so you want to be real careful about that. Next you will see a screen that looks like this the lab environment is being allocated for you and you will receive a link for that where you will sign in so you see the sign in screen there and it'll say student is your username password will be something like bootcamp with two zeros instead of o's your proctor will give you all of that information you click sign in and you come to the exam windows there are two windows and then you will have others that you will will open the first one here shows you several items one your timer tells you how much time is left in your three hours you can always come back to this window to see how you're doing on time the other sections are the actual lab environments so you have and i've got highlighted in blue credentials so you can ssh into your environment so you can perform the command line client details or tasks then in the yellow is highlighted the ui or the horizon dashboard ui credentials you'll need both so at this point i would start an ssh session and i would start a ui session in the exam tasks you'll see basically task like you see here task one task two task three i've had to blur out the majority of the content so that we don't give you the details to the exam you'll follow those tasks and in most cases task three will require task two or task one so most of the tasks are serial the tasks here don't say you have to use the command line or the ui so you take your pick and as you go through that it'll be a scrollable list eventually you'll get to task 23 and you will be done with the exam what do you do if you have any issues with the exam itself for the lab environment things are not responding you get an unexpected error don't wait ping your proctor immediately don't waste time you've got three hours to get through the exam if it's something the proctor can correct for you let the proctor do it and then return back to the exam don't waste time trying to debug things since you do not have access to the online documentation anymore from the command line you can get help this slide shows you an example of using an open stack image create command i don't know what the syntax is so i use the dash dash help parameter or operand and that's going to give me a rather verbose output so i've only shown you the key parts of it remembering you do not have access to the open stack docs for help you do have help available to you use the system to help you so for example with the command line if you aren't familiar with a command or its operands which you should for the most part be able to do but suppose you're not and you're asked to create an image in this case we're looking at an open stack image create command and i don't know all the operands so i use the dash dash help operand or parameter to give me output or help on how to create an image i'll add the caveat that i can't display all of the help on the slide so what i focused on here was the basic syntax there are more details that i left off that are not shown on the slide those details will help me understand for example i should have a file or a volume that contains my image so that's a required parameter my image name is a required parameter the other parameters such as container format or disk format if i read the rest of the help that will tell me that they have default values same thing with the visibility that's why on one side i have in yellow the required parameters or expected parameters and on the right i've got in that purple color the defaults so i don't have to enter every single parameter read the help and it should get you after maybe a few trial and error cases it'll get you to the right place at least as far as the exam to create the image in this example remember you are expected to understand and know some of this coming into the exam all right so let's go through some tips and useful resources to you for the exam preparing for the exam etc to prepare for the coa practice makes perfect practice practice practice practice again if you're doing these tasks in your daily job you're practicing it but there may be cases where you're not so you might want to use a tool such as dev stack to spin up an open stack environment so you can test your skills look at the domain knowledge requirements and give yourself a test creating projects users networks routers floating ip addresses etc etc you can do that and get familiar with things do it from the command line do it from the ui get familiar with both the other option is take a class and there are many companies that provide training for the coa you can go out to the marketplace for that the open stack marketplace look for the coa badge marantis has several classes that will help you you see the url at the bottom that will take you through more details on each of the classes there's a bootcamp one three-day class and an accelerated bootcamp which is four days you'll create manage images networks volumes instances users projects heat stacks etc that's in the os 100 three-day class os 250 adds a fourth day on to that os 100 class where you manually install and configure each of the open stack components so you start off with an ubuntu environment you install the database and the network time protocol and rabid mq and then keystone and and so on so it's a little bit more detailed a little bit more accelerated a little bit more intense but the good news is each of those classes includes what we call a comprehensive practice lab you can use that lab as a guideline to whether you're ready for the coa or not so take a class with marantis in that class you'll have the comprehensive practice lab don't look at the course materials don't look at any cheat sheets don't look at any online doc if you can go through that lab without any help from any resources including your instructor then you're set for the coa lastly there is a block on the marantis website it is intended to provide you with additional answers to questions you might have what i tried to do is anticipate the questions you'd have and provide you with the answers i encourage you to read that blog read the press releases from marantis and the open stack foundation and then when you're ready sign up for the coa exam if you need a little bit more training a little bit more honing of your skills then sign up for a class and i encourage you to do that go back to the beginning when i said why take the coa it's an industry-wide recognized certification it documents what skills you have and will help you going forward in your career or even just help you day to day as you interact with customers for example i'd like to thank you for taking the time to listen to this video and again go out to that blog where you can get some additional information chances are most questions you have i've included in that blog and you'll get answers thank you