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In September 2005, Florian Brand, a Red Hat instructor based in Stuttgart, Germany, was the first person to earn Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) certification. A six year veteran of Red Hat, Florian currently travels far and wide teaching RHCE and RHCA courses.
Want to follow in his foot steps an earn an RHCA? His words of wisdom appear below.
1. How does it feel to be the first RHCA in the world?
I am relieved and happy. The race was quite close at the end. A fellow US Instructor almost earned it before me. In the end, I beat her to it because I flew to Korea to take my final required exam. I am happy it worked out as it did!
2. What advice could you provide to others who want to become RHCA?
First and foremost, take your time. RHCA involves five different topics and each course is quite broad. It takes a while to digest all the information.
For the exams, keep in mind that most of the information is documented in the system, so you don't have to memorize all those details. Focus on the bigger picture.
And perhaps most importantly, on exam day, don't panic!
3. What was the most challenging class? Expertise Exam?
The most challenging class is RH442 Red Hat Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance Tuning, because it is quite heavy on theory. But without this background the course would be pointless. For example, how could you tune a system without knowing the inner workings?
The most difficult Expertise Exam in my opinion is EX333 Red Hat Security: Network Services. The class itself covers a lot of varied information, and the exam follows suit. The topics themselves aren't necessarily more difficult than the four other courses, but it is a lot to remember.
4. What is your impression of the Expertise Exam system, as opposed to one big exam?
The five RHCA Expertise Exams have a total exam time of more than 24 hours. There is simply no way to do this in one single exam. Plus, imagine how you'd feel if you only failed one of the five items, and then had to take the entire test over again! So I think the Expertise Exam model is very fair and a lot more manageable.
Additionally the Certificates of Expertise have a distinct value on their own. Maybe a company needs a cluster specialist, not an architect-level jack of all trades. In that case, the candidate can still earn a cluster management Certificate of Expertise without having to take an entire curriculum that may or may not be relevant to his/her job.
5. As a Red Hat instructor who is now teaching these courses, what is the students' reaction to the Expertise Exams?
Each person is different, and the reaction to the tests themselves ranges from "Wow, that was way above my head!" to "Can I do the next one tomorrow?" It just depends on the person and their skill level. Interestingly, I see a lot of interest from freelance consultants/instructors in particular, who want to distinguish themselves from the crowd.
6. How will the certification impact your teaching methods?
If anything, RHCA will prove beneficial because I can add more depth to many discussions. There is a fine line though—I always like to provide insightful information, but at the same time I do not want to overwhelm students with too much detail. But, Red Hat expects RHCA for all their senior technical personnel, so I am merely the first of many who will have this vantage point.
7. What's next for you?
The next item on my to do-list is earning RHCSS (Red Hat Certified Security Specialist) certification. Luckily two of the the three required exams (EX423 and EX333) overlap with RHCA requirements, so I am 2/3 of the way there already. So, I only need to pass EX429 SELinux Policy Administration for the certification.
Before taking the exam, I am really looking forward to attending the RH429 class. SELinux is great piece of technology and I want to write my own policy for my servers. The standard targeted policy already saved my neck once when someone tried to mess with my web server. I want to learn more and raise my skill level a bit higher.
