 Welcome. My name is Paul Quigley. I am a technical curriculum developer and instructor within the Marantis training team. What does that mean? I put the classes together and I get to teach them. My focus is on OpenStack. So I am here to talk to you today about the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam, more commonly known as the COA exam. And this will be a brief session to introduce you to the exam. Maybe you were certified years ago and now you need to get re-certified. Maybe you've never taken the exam and you're afraid, you're scared, you're not sure. I'm here to introduce you to what's in the exam, not necessarily the contents, but how to approach it and how to get prepared and all of that. Okay? One thing I'll say upfront is we are now supporting the Usari OpenStack release, the you release, for the exam lab environment. What does that mean? Well don't, don't, don't get upset. The exam tests a core set of skills. So you don't have to know everything that's in Usari and in fact what's in the exam you should be able to complete without any Usari background. Okay? So that's sufficient enough. As long as you don't understand OpenStack you should be able to get through the tasks. Okay? So let's get started. We're going to talk about today what is this thing called the COA exam and why is it important? What do you want to take it? Once you decide to take it, what skills do you need? Okay? What domain knowledge do you need? And I'll cover all of this as we go through this session. Then what to expect during the exam? And lastly we'll wrap up with some tips and useful resources. How do you prepare? How do you practice? What's the best way? The Certified OpenStack Administrator exam provides you a career path based certification. Okay? It's skills-based, performance-based. You'll have a list of tasks to complete. The task may say create this user in this project with this role. The project may not exist. The role may not exist. You need to figure out all of the pieces and parts to do that. So that's one task. You've got 20 plus tasks to go through the exam. You get enough time. Don't worry. We'll cover all of that and we'll cover what some of that domain knowledge is. What you should be expected to know so that you can look at the slides and say, oh I don't know that. I guess I better learn. The primary guideline for the exam for you to look at and consider is the exam is written such that it assumes you are an OpenStack Administrator involved in the day-to-day management of your OpenStack Cloud operation and management for at least six months. Now you may not have that criteria. One of the steps to prepare, you can always take a class and the class will help you fill in the gaps. Okay? So that's the guidelines and that's an overview of what the exam is. Let's keep going. Why take the exam? Well since the middle of 2016, so about four and a half years, the exam's been an industry-recognized certification. Okay? Everybody wants to be COA certified. It's a again, skills-based exam, so you have to understand skills and tasks, not what's the command to create a user, what's the command to create a role, how do I add that user into that project? You should know that. Okay? So we're not going to tell you all of the steps. Again, you should be doing this on a daily basis for at least six months. The goal is it shows that you know how to use OpenStack and the main thing is the exam is vendor-neutral. So by getting a COA certification, it proves that you can use any OpenStack distribution, whether it comes from Arantis or Red Hat or any of the vendors. The vendors add in additional code and packaging and function on top of or around OpenStack. The exam, being vendor-neutral, tests the core competencies. If you're anywhere close to being up to date on OpenStack, you'll be okay. Don't worry about the USARI updates. The goal is to prove you have the skills to operate and manage the OpenStack cloud. The exam itself is planned or targeted or booked for three hours. Most students finish in under two hours. Okay? So that tells you, if you're an average student, you'll finish in under two hours. If you run into problems and you need to undo certain tasks, you have time. Don't panic. Don't stress. Okay, you'll have time to do all that. Again, 20 plus tasks can tell you the exact number of tasks because those might change in the future. Okay? The URL is shown on the slide and I'll show a screen capture from that in a minute. That's where you register for the exam. So the exams are scheduled in advance, typically every two weeks. The time frames, the time zones, might be US, European, Asia Pacific. So you can take an exam a little bit closer to your local time zone as opposed to having to start the exam at midnight and go for three hours. I don't know about you. I'm not a nighttime person. So I probably wouldn't pass an exam if I started at midnight. Price, you see there, 400 US dollars. That's the standard price. Then here is the webpage to enroll in your exam. Several things to notice. One, you don't want to wait till the last second. For example, the October 6th exam is already full. So now we're taking names for a waiting list. Two, you typically see about every two weeks and the time zones will be different. Very easy. If I want to take the January 6th exam, I click on register and that's going to ask for my information, a credit card, so it can be, the 400 dollars can be charged to the credit card, etc. Okay? So you have plenty of time to get prepared. Don't wait until the last second because that exam might be full or the next couple of exams might be full. We've seen an uptick in interest and more people signing up for the exam. So they fill up a little bit more quickly. So I could sign up for that January 6th exam and continue prepping and practicing for the exam. The other thing to mention, even if I'm the only person signed up for that date at that time, the exam is guaranteed to run. So if it's just me, it's just me, I get to take the exam. So you don't have to worry about the exam being canceled due to lack of interest for that. So let's look at a little bit more details about the exam. It's based on, again, OpenStack Usari, although again, most of the tasks don't require that you know Usari. If you're not running Usari, maybe you're running Rocky or Stein. You'll still be able to pass the exam. The tasks are such that you can figure it out. If you've got that six-month background and you've been using OpenStack, you can figure it out. Uses Ubuntu 1804 just as an FYI. When you connect, you will need to make sure that you are using either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and the latest release or the latest version of those. Why? It just to avoid complications. Everybody gets their own environment. Each environment is a blank canvas. From there, you create projects and users and roles and networks and images and instances and volumes and so on. We'll talk about what that is under what we call domain knowledge coming up in a few minutes. To do that, you can use either the command line, the CLI client, the OpenStack command. A lot of folks call it the Linux command line, but it's the OpenStack command line client or the Horizon dashboard UI. I'll add the one caveat that you might see a task or two that either says use the UI for this, use the command line for this, or might not even tell you to complete the task successfully, you might have to figure that out. Be familiar with using the command line as well as the UI. That's my advice. If you need help, use the help that's available in the UI or the command line help that's available. Do not go out to any other external website like docs.openstack.org. If you do, you will automatically fail the exam. Okay, so no external website access once you start the exam. No cheat sheets. Don't run anything down on the palm of your hand. You're expected to understand how to accomplish each of the tasks without the need for a lot of help. Again, use the system, the UI or the command line, to help guide you. So for a command line, you might not be aware of all the parameters on an image create command. You can type in image create, it's going to tell you what parameters are missing, then you can ask for help on those from the command line, not from another website, not from a book. Okay, domain knowledge covers again the core set of components, Keystone, Nova, Glance that you see on this slide, and we'll go through some slides real quickly in a second that goes through what do you need to know for Keystone for Cinder, etc. Okay, this is called the domain knowledge. What are you expected to know? You also have a URL on a slide, which further documents some of the tasks that you should be able to perform. APIs again, UI command line. Either one, some cases you might be expected to use only to CLI or the UI. I've had students ask, well, can you give me a little help with that? No, I can't. Use whichever you're comfortable with, but just be prepared that you must be able to demonstrate use of both. Like I said, some tasks, you might not be able to complete them accurately if you use one over the other. Okay, the good news is you don't need to understand REST APIs, for example. Okay, I always get that question in my classes. You don't need to understand REST APIs. I'm going to go through these slides quickly. Keystone, identity service. You should be able to understand how to create, manage, domains, projects, users, roles. Okay, the difference is between the roles, how users can be members of multiple projects with multiple roles, the policy files that control access to what you can and can't do. So you might be asked to edit the policy files. Okay, you want to make sure you know how to do that. Okay, RC files. A lot of shops, people aren't familiar when they enter command line commands. There are environment variables that get set up. Those are set in these things called RC files. Check into that. You might be asked to create and manage those files as well. Nova, about one-third of the exam. Typical stuff, flavors, instances, create an instance from a group volume, maybe. Use server groups or host aggregates, SSH keys possible, instance snapshots, floating IP addresses, et cetera. So you can see a pretty extensive list for Nova. And you should be able to do all of those. And then some. There's nothing that's not on this list that's not in the exam, but this is a super set. So you'll, the exam will cover some of these, but not all of these. Same thing with all of the items I'm listing here. Glance, you should know how to upload an image, how to manage them, update them, how to add metadata and so on, how to manage the image cache. If you don't know what the image cache is, you might want to study up on that one. Just giving you a few pointers and tips. Swift for object storage, you should know how to, for example, create containers and upload files to those containers and manage permissions on those containers and so on. Neutron, another biggie, about 30%. You should know how to create networks, subnetworks, routers, whether it's the external network or the private network. And how do you connect those networks? How do you share the networks? How do you manage quotas? How do you create ports and deploy instances and floating IPs and security groups and rules and such? Okay. And I'm going through this fast. The goal here is to give you this list and then you can look at it and say, oh, okay, I don't know anything about floating IP addresses. I bet a study. Or I don't know anything about network quotas. Same thing. Cinder, the block storage or volume service, about 10%. You should be able to create volumes and manage them and attach and detach them from instances, manage quotas for the volumes, create snapshots, resize them, create boot volumes, et cetera. So that kind of gives you a little bit of the domain knowledge information. Then during the exam, you have multiple windows that you'll need to have open, four to be precise. One for the exam. So when you start the exam, you'll be given credentials to log into the exam window. That is going to show you your timer. It'll count down from three hours. And it will give you credentials to start an SSH session for your command line access and to start a browser session for the dashboard UI. Then the last window you'll need is the actual exam tasks. And I'll show you an example of that coming up. So for windows, you should not need anymore. If you do, then you're probably cheating. The tasks window. So you'll see something similar to the graphic on this slide. Task one, company has two departments, et cetera, et cetera. Task two, task three, and so on. It'll be a scrollable window with all the tasks for the exam. Can you skip a task? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. So the exam isn't written to that level of detail. You need to understand that. So if I get stuck creating users and projects, I'm not going to be able to complete the rest of the exam because the exam is going to use those same users and projects. But I might get stuck creating a volume and I can go on and create an instance or whatever the next step is. So that's part of the knowledge and the skills you need to understand as well. You have three hours, most students complete it in under two. So we covered briefly that domain knowledge. What are you expected to know? How do you prepare? Practice. Unless you know this stuff cold, you need to practice. So there are a couple of ways to practice. One, and I get this question in all my classes. How do I spin up a test environment just to play around with OpenStack and practice? You can use a tool such as DevStack to build that environment and then from there, do some practice. If you take a class, that will get you ready for the exam. Most vendors for OpenStack provide training. There's training vendors, and Mirantis is one of the training vendors. You want to go to the marketplace and look for a vendor that has this COA badge, such as Mirantis. You see the COA badge. Then that will list the classes for that vendor. Click on the link, for example, for OS 220 and that will take you to page two enroll in a public OS 220 class, for example. Any of the other vendors training will work the same. I work for Mirantis, so I'll show you a Mirantis example. Within the Mirantis training, there's a series of classes, and they're designed based on different skills, different roles. OS 100, the OpenStack Essentials class, is one day. In it, we will basically introduce you to OpenStack and what the core components of Nova, Keystone, Glance, Neutron, etc. are. Then we'll talk about Magnum for deploying your container orchestration engines and Zoom for deploying your containers and Cloud Kitty for costing and billing and so on. We'll give you a high-level introduction to all of that. The goal, that's intended for someone who's relatively new to OpenStack or doesn't know anything about OpenStack at all. That's the target audience. OS 220 is our administration and operations class. In there, you will do a lot of work, a lot, with understanding the components in detail. We'll look at Keystone in detail. We'll look at Nova in detail. We'll look at Neutron in detail. Where can I plug my various networking drivers into Neutron and so on? How do I operate that and manage that? How do I create my networks? How do I upload images? How do I create boot volumes, etc. That 220 class is three days. You can use that to prepare for the COA exam. After that class, you're pretty well set. All of the skills that we talk about in that class are part of the COA exam or more than you need for the COA exam. I can take both 100 and 220 as a bundle. That's called OS 250. Additionally, we also have a one-day class, 320 OpenStack Advanced Deployment. That class is targeted for your Cloud administrators that need to understand how is OpenStack built. Basically, it's 95% Labs and you build a private Cloud with OpenStack in a day. Get your tile and all. At the end of the Labs, you will have a private Cloud running in the lab environment. That's the purpose of that. You can see how it's configured so that you can maybe change your own configuration settings or maybe you're a support person and you have to debug. You can see all that information in that class. The path is intended 100, 220, 320. After 220, you could take the COA exam or you could take 320 and then take the COA exam. At that point, it's either or. I could take 220, take the exam and come back and take 320. 320 is a little bit more complex, more intense, and a different audience, but it is helpful and beneficial. I've had a lot of students provide positive feedback on that class as well. For all the classes, you can go out to training.marantis.com and you can see all of those classes. Okay, real quickly, OS 100, new or relatively inexperienced OpenStack users, introductory class. We'll talk about the core set of services, Keystone, Nova, and Neutron for infrastructure as a service. We'll talk about other components, Magnum and Zoom for containers and bare metal, the ironic project, Cloud Kitty for billing and rating and more. The goal here is to introduce you to a wide range of the OpenStack componentry. Get you interested in those. Focus on the core set for the lab exercises and then get you into the 220 class. The 220, it's a three-day class, gives you that complete experience. You've got a lot more details behind Keystone provides identity services. You're going to understand what Keystone is in detail when you leave or complete the 220 class. At the end of that class, you've got the skills to pass the exam. I'll also add all of the Marantis courses are vendor agnostic, vendor neutral. So we teach OpenStack. We do not teach any other vendor added or vendor evaluated code. So we'll talk about in all of our classes like LVM, logical volume manager for block storage, and OpenV switch for layer two networking and so on. Tips for taking the exam. Other than practice, practice, practice. I wrote a blog last year when Marantis started administering the COA exam and in that blog, there are many links to give you information that you can use from there to get more background and more knowledge and more understanding, etc. That's where I would start if you're looking for additional help. Take a class and then practice, practice, practice, practice. You can never have enough practice. With that, I'll conclude the session and say thank you for your time. I hope the session was worthwhile for you. Again, you might have gotten certified back in 2016 and need to get re-certified. Things have changed. You might be a first time attendee looking to get certified. I'm trying to give you enough information to get you started and set the stage for what level of skills that you should have to be successful to pass the exam. And with that, I'll conclude and say thank you.