Red Hat have some really fantastic training courses. The quality of the content and the lab environments are second to none.
I’m not Red Hat certified. I haven’t sat for any of the certification exams, and I’m not trying to pass myself off as certified. However in the course of my job, I’ve been lucky enough to have access to the Red Hat premium training subscription and have completed a number of their courses.
The Red Hat Systems Administration I and II are in-depth, hands-on courses about managing Red Hat Linux systems. Although the courses are specific to Red Hat, the skills are applicable to Linux in general. Although I’ve used Linux for years, I really got a lot of value from these two courses. As well as these, I also did the RHCSA Fast Track course, which is a shorter version of RH124 and RH134.
The Red Hat Linux Automation course is a great resource for learning about Ansible and is the preparation course for the Red Hat Certified Engineer certification. I’m actually re-watching some of the chapters in this course at the moment.
I was working on a project to build an Automation Platform at work while I was studying the DO374 and the DO467 courses. Making the leap from running Ansible playbooks from the commandline to actually building and running Ansible Automation Platform is a pretty big change, particularly as the Ansible code we were running is older Ansible 2.9, and a lot has changed in recent versions. I had to learn about collections and executable environments, I’ve had to migrate our code to run with newer versions of Ansible and refactor our legacy codebase.
Ansible Automation Platform is also a really cool technology. I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve successfully deployed a 6 node AAP cluster at work running Ansible across multiple data centers and subnets for CentOS, RHEL and Oracle Linux versions 7, 8 and 9.
The RH358 course is, I believe, actually what used to be RHCE training but with the transition to Ansible and Automation, Red Hat decided to change it up. I did this course to round things out but I still found it really valuable.
As a Systems Adminstrator, Linux Security is part of my job. I think it’s important for anyone working on computer systems to at least have some security knowledge, but this course was a great dive into Red Hat specific security.
I’m fascinated with HA clusters, and have an NFS cluster at work that I occasionally have to work with. The RH436 course gave me a good background in how clusters work and how to manage them. I’ve got a half-written post about building a HA cluster which I’ll get around to finishing soon.
I’ll actually be rebuilding our HA cluster at work in the next few months as it needs to be upgraded, so doing the training is going to come in handy.
I did the RH318 virtualisation courses because I do use virtual machines a lot and wanted to see what Red Hat’s offerings were like. I use Proxmox, Libvirt and Virtualbox at home, and work we use VMware vSphere so RHV was less relevant, but still super interesting.
I do use containers quite a bit, especially when I was building out the AAP platform and getting custom execution environments working. I’ve used a bit of Kubernetes and was curious about OpenShift. I want to transition my homelab to use more containers and was thinking about looking into either OpenShift or OKD. The conversation about deploying containers and self-service infrastructure at work as popped up a couple times, and I like throw in there that OpenShift as a possible solution to some hypervisor issues.
