I'm curious to hear others' comments on this as well. Let me share my thoughts.

I'm a sysadmin for a HPC cluster. I do not have any of these certs. I think my day job involves a lot of diagnosing issues which involves detailed understanding of how the system works rather than actually developing any parts of that system.

A second fun part of this job is when designing infrastructure for use by others. To take into consideration all that can go wrong, performance characteristics of hardware, software, and workload and trade one off for other can be really challenging and fun if you're into that sort of a thing.

I'm not sure the RedHat certs will help you all the way through, although they might be a good starter in this regard. A lot is obtained by getting hands dirty and learning by making mistakes.

If you're into managing systems and building/engineering infrastructure, I'd wholeheartedly recommend spending time with small scale infrastructure in a "homelab" setting or if you can afford $$ with VMs in the cloud even.

Cheers!

I don't have any certs and I'm a senior Linux admin. I like the Suse track.

I would persue them before RH, https://training.suse.com/certification/

I find certifications good for really three things:

1.) Having a structured curriculum to learn something new. All my tech skills are self-taught, and it's useful to have a structured learning path.

2.) Validating your skills, especially when you're changing careers. I went from working in call centers to AWS Systems Architect/Linux SysAdmin by virtue of a couple of certs.

3.) Sometimes employers require certain certifications as a condition of employment (or continued employment). This one can be a bit sticky, though. Make sure those certifications make sense for the role. I can't tell you how many job listings I see wanting CompTIA A+. Unless you're applying to work for Geek Squad, you probably don't need an A+ cert (which asks things like 'What is RAM'? 'What is Bluray?').

If you want to get into Linux, getting a couple of certs won't hurt. Red Hat's certs are probably the most well-respected, but of course are centered around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and by extension CentOS).

If you want a good cert path for Debian, go with the Linux Foundation certs. Linux Foundation's certs are less well-known, but also practical exams.

I would avoid LPIC and CompTIA Linux+ certs (NOTE: I am Linux+ and LPIC-1 certified). They are multiple choice exams and really emphasize based on rote memorization of command flags, which really isn't useful to be an actual Linux SysAdmin. Then's the last time you ran into a bzip2 archive? I can't remember the last time I did, but I still remember that tar xjf will unzip one. But, of course, if I did run into a bzip2 in the wild, I can just as easily read the tar man page. Thanks LPIC!

In the latest versions of tar, no need to specify compression type if it has a valid extension.

Interesting. Then again, that shows another problem with the LPIC exams: They're really out of date.

This.

There are some good certs, like AWS and RHCE and some really crappy ones.

Talk to people before doing them to get a feeling if they're worth it.

I would not call AWS certs “good”, especially not the associate certs. I have the the three associates and two professional ones. The company paid for all except the first.

AWS is so massive, it’s hard to know where to start to get a general overview of it. Studying for and at least doing proof of concepts help with giving you an organized learning path with an end goal in mind.

But, I still don’t think that the certifications necessarily show any level of competence.

I was the dev lead at a mid size company with a small development shop. I was specifically hired to modernize the department and to architect a green field project. Right after I designed the system, they decided to “move to the cloud”. I knew nothing about AWS at the time and neither did they. So they hired a bunch of “certified consultants”.

At the end of the day with the consultants “help”, I ended up setting up an environment just like I would on prem (first mistake) with seven (1 in DEV/QA/UAT and a cluster in production) small VMs for Consul, Nomad, Mongo. I’m already at 21 servers. This doesn’t count two VMs for build servers and 10 or 11 app servers in all.

While this design would have been perfectly acceptable for an on prem setup and looking back I wouldn’t have done anything differently if we were on prem, this was a horrible system for AWS. We could have used managed services for everything above and not had a single VM running except the app servers (today we could have used Fargate to avoid even the app servers but it wasn’t around at the time). We could have even used managed ElasticSearch instead of Mongo since the data stored in Mongo wasn’t the source of truth.

But the “certified consultants” were a bunch of old school infrastructure guys who only knew how to click around on the web console (2nd mistake) and do a “lift and shift”.

I started studying for the AWS Architect Associate just so I could talk intelligently to the consultants and see what type of improvements I could do during phase 2. I had already designed the system to abstract our dependency on Consul, Nomad, and Mongo. I was horrified after discovering all that AWS could have managed for us. I was more horrified that the certified consultants didn’t have a clue. I was most horrified that I passed the certification without ever touching the console and just by watching the videos.

For various reasons, I ended up changing jobs shortly there after, to work for a company that was a pure AWS shop with a new (to the company) manager that wanted to be more “AWS native”.

I became the “AWS guy” even though I’m a developer. Eventually we started interviewing “AWS Architects”. None of the people we were looking for (mid level) had any practical experience. They had just memorized enough from ACloudGuru to pass a multiple choice test.

I had the impression the associate certs are much better than most certs out there.

Sure, nothing beats experience, but they are a good place to start your cloud journey :)

The last set of certs I did was around 2010. They were the six certs required to be a Microsoft Certified Architect (?). I was transistioning from a decade of C bit twiddling with some VB6 on the side to becoming an “Enterprise Developer” and had just gotten a job where they were transitioning to from a VB/C++ backend to .Net.

My thought process for the certifications were the same - a method to get on an organized learning path. But, by the time the company folded two years later, the certs had already expired and I never bothered getting them renewed. I knew it wouldn’t matter when looking for my next job. So they have never appeared on my resume.

Looking back, I don’t think that the AWS Associate certs were any better or worse than the Microsoft certs. But I will keep these up to date.

The second part of the story is that after seeing how much these “certified consultants” were making - I was the dev lead after all - I realized where the money was. Especially since I already had a long development background and some Devops experience I could be much better at AWS consulting than some infrastructure guys.

When I changed companies, I negotiated not to be a team lead. I wanted to be an IC to fill in some technical gaps and get hands on experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant moving companies up on the cloud maturity model”.

Sounds nice. Any career tips?

I'm currently getting into the whole serverless space (after I got my aws associate cerst) as a freelance consultant coming from mobile.

Study for the developer cert and do some hands on work. Again, it’s not because I believe in the importance of “getting the certification”, it’s about the guided learning path.

I was able to get experience through my job, but if that isn’t an option for you, just build something. There are some really good, cheap, thorough Udemy course (no affiliation, not affilliate links):

This course goes over API Gateway, lambda, DynamoDB and a quick overview of how to create a NodeJS Serverless app:

https://www.udemy.com/share/1010qKBUQdeF5TQn4=/

That is the “right way” to create a Serverless API, but if you want to take a regular old Node/Express API and run through lambda you can use the lambda proxy integration:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express

There are similar frameworks for Python/Django and C#/WebAPI

And for the love of all that is holy, learn CloudFormation and don’t create resources manually.

https://www.udemy.com/share/1011JEBUQdeF5TQn4=/

If you have any questions, an email address is in my profile.

Cool, thanks.

I already got the cerst (DA & SAA) and built a few things with SAM and Amplify.

For what its worth I would, as a system administrator, I would say falling back to infrastructure administration on the level that the RHCE helps with, won't keep you relevant, unless you're moving into an area which specifically requires it.

I go my RHCE 5 years ago and it was a great primer on how Linux systems run and I recommend it to anyone interested in modern Linux. It will give you many insights which will help you in the future in understanding how Linux works. I was moving over from Windows administration and it was a godsend.

That said this lower level of administration is becoming harder to break into, with automation, containers, ease of use improvements and the cloud, the need for the properly managed system is dwindling. I'm sure there will be a need for a long time, but they generally won't be good jobs. If you have some technical proficiency already I would say there are better places to improve your prospects.

Also the test is hard to prepare for so there is a time commitment and it does expire (I'm no longer an RHCE :() so there is that.

I hope that helps.

> I go my RHCE 5 years ago and it was a great primer on how Linux systems run and I recommend it to anyone interested in modern Linux. It will give you many insights which will help you in the future in understanding how Linux works. I was moving over from Windows administration and it was a godsend.

I'm not sure it entirely still works, but for anyone that wants a much deeper look into how a system Linux is put together and how a lot of the parts interact (at a higher level, but still a level often not covered), check out the Linux From Scratch project.[1] Around 2001 or 2002 I was helping to design a small custom Linux distro with some friends, and going through this project was invaluable for learning a lot of how a GNU/Linux system was put together and functions as a whole.

There really is something to be said for manually going through every step, and compiling every software package, and experiencing the functionality it provides, since a good chunk of the work is done in a chroot after you've bootstrapped it enough to make it minimally viable.

1: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/

I was hoping you could expand on your statement of prospects for those with technical proficiency? What are your thoughts on proper skill investment if some of the skills associated with formal RHCE seem to be decreased.

My feeling is that greater proficiency in how code, leveraging the services can serve perspective employers. It's vague and I'm not sure if it can be quantified as easily as the RHCE, so let me give you an example.

With the RHCE you learn about configuring Linux systems. That is building single systems from scratch, configuring firewalls, service files, security configuration and so on. The old format when I took it was the RHCSA would teach you about the system through boot, and the RHCE would teach about how to configure the services, at least that's how one of my instructors put it.

In terms of real world work, at most companies most of this work/process is done in the beginning of their technical life (starting the company or new endeavor) and once you have a method of building servers, and working configurations you don't revisit these concepts as much. Maybe that is what the Ansible cert is supposed to address.

The hard part from an employment perspective is that this work is slowly moving away towards the cloud and all in one solutions which reduce the need for this type of administration.

The big shops have large processes which likely involve solving problems on a more abstract level than what you learn with the RHCE. It's important to know for sure, but likely 95% of these problems are solved on the configuration management, cloud provisioning, or some other level.

On the other extreme, the newer, smaller places aren't going to invest in building Linux servers. They are more likely to maybe have a Windows server/NAS or, more likely, all cloud services at this point.

As an interviewee I have seen this where you grind through technical interviews (about an hour of lots of arcane, frequently out of date questions) and they tend to want either drones to do grunt work with little opportunity for growth, or know their exact technical stack to solve some specific problem.

As an interviewer I see a lot of developer/jack of all trade types trying to sell themselves as system admins whereas its clear that they don't really know system administration. We had one candidate the other day who had worked for close to 10 years in the larger organization who didn't know what /var was. :0

There is still a role for the RHCE style engineers and I had a good time learning it, but at this point I'm not sure where that path will lead in the future.

I think a better use of time would be to learn python or javacript, find a way to apply it to the area you would like to do it, get a green lawn on github, learn how to do something impressive with some public APIs.

Just my 2c as a sysadmin take from it what you will.

I appreciate the feedback. I'm a Junior Windows Sysadmin right now trying to guide myself into a direction. My work is mostly with a cloud-fearing customer who keeps ALL things in-house, so my view of work from inside this chamber makes feel anxious about what the real world is doing/offering. I've noticed that within a vast organization such as the one I work in - the opportunities to perform from zero installs/configurations is pretty much nonexistent and a push to DevOps/automation/cloud tech is more of would-like-to-have and not really a goal that is in the making.

Diving into code such as python and Javascript is probably a good fail safe/transferable skill wherever I end up/doing. I've been leaning towards the whole Linux/CCNA/Networking/Cloud roadmap but am still relatively unsure.

I appreciate your feedback and the opportunity to bounce things around.

They definitely are a really good starting point... Passing this exam (which is positioned as 'intermediate/advanced linux knowledge' exam) will let the possible employers know you've got potential, and that you're not a complete newbie wrt Linux. That said, it'll get you an interview, not a job.

I do not agree that data science is a bubble. However, I think everyone who uses Linux professionally would benefit from training, (and the redhat training/certification is quite good).

I don't see the data science bubble bursting. Data is the fuel of the 21st century economy and I don't see that changing.

From a data scientist that has been working as an architect for data systems for some time now, the way that data science was done 2 years ago changed considerably to how we do data science and design data systems geared to machine learning today. Data can be the "fuel" the economy, but the extreme demand for data scientists that need to know a huge number of things, from statistics do machine learning to programming, databases and so on, is reducing, and more specialized roles, like machine learning engineer, is growing. That´s the reason for my comment: the bubble of data scientist highly skilled over a vast number of areas is dying, and data scientists need to start to specialize to survive.

They're a good starting point. The Linux side is very broad and there's high demand.

Can I ask you why it's a bubble? I don't work on "data science" but I feel like data, and in particular working with large amounts of data, is valuable.

Sure. I consider that the way we do data science and hire data scientists is a bubble because it´s unsusteinable and business are asking more and more about the returns of the large, expensive investments on "artificial intelligence". No doubt that working with data is getting more and more valuable, but the way it is done today is changing, and fast.