Passed EX180 Containers and Kubernetes

Ending the year with Podman.

EX180 Exam Experience

I took a remote exam that was based on OpenShift 4.6 and some old version of Podman that did not support --list-tags. That was a bit unexpected as I practised using the latest version of Podman (my bad really).

This was my very first remote Red Hat exam, and it did not disappoint. Creating a bootable remote exam live environment USB was straightforward. Do make sure that the checksum of the ISO file matches with the one provided in Red Hat’s documentation before you burn it to a USB though.

I did have one small technical issue where towards the end of the exam, with about 15 minutes to go, my remote session expired, and I started getting “Access Denied” error. I had to reboot my laptop and reconnect. I don’t know why this happened, I checked my homelab monitoring system and there were no network outages reported at all. Fortunately, the proctor called me to sort it out and then kindly extended the exam to account for those missing minutes where I had to perform a reboot, therefore I did not lose any time. In all honestly, I was pretty much done with the exam by that point and was about to check the tasks to make sure that everything’s working, however, had this problem happened in the middle of the session it would have been much more disruptive.

EX180 is a 2-hour exam, given the objectives I think it’s reasonable. I spent the first 10 minutes reading descriptions of all exam tasks, and finished with approximately 15 minutes to spare.

If there is one advice that I could give you, it is to always, and I mean always, specify the OpenShift namespace that you are going to deploy your resources to during the exam.

The exam score 285/300.

I’m not sure how I lost the points to be fair because everything worked from my perspective, and I solved all the tasks.

Exam Preparation

I had done the official Red Hat’s DO180 course before I took the EX280 OpenShift exam (a couple of year back), therefore I used the same study material to refresh my memory on EX180.

I used CodeReady containers to deploy an instance of OpenShift to my homelab and it worked really well. I covered all exam objectives and practises deploying applications “the OpenShift way” (oc new-app). Full disclosure, I’ve been using Docker and Kubernetes for a couple of years which naturally helped a lot.

28 thoughts on “Passed EX180 Containers and Kubernetes

  1. Hi Lisenet, congrats on passing the exam and thanks for your GitHub notes. What are your plans for next year?

    • Hi Erwin, thanks! I plan on completing the Kubernetes trilogy next year by taking CKAD and CKS. It’s going to be fun!

  2. How different, would you say, is deploying applications “the OpenShift way” versus deploying them the K8s way? I’m considering learning the K8s way of deploying apps to fill in the gaps with the other “OpenShift ways” like: oc create

    • I’d say it’s “different”. OpenShift has an integrated developer workflow with CI/CD pipelines and S2I, plus provides routes to expose services. Things like deployment and build configs, images streams, routes are specific to OpenShift, you won’t find then in standard K8s. If you use them heavily on OpenShift, then deploying apps in K8s will be different. If you don’t use them, chances are you won’t notice any difference.

  3. I also passed the Exam thank to you. Thank you so much bro…Your contents are great.Can I get a invite for the slack community or discord?

  4. Congratulation Tomas and as always thanks for sharing your experience. does passing this exam extend all RHEL certs even the ones that are classified as “Infrastructure”?

    • Hi Abdulmalik, thank you so much.

      Passing and earning additional credentials (like EX180) beyond RHCE moves the non-current date for both RHCE and RHCSA out to 3 years from the date on which the additional credentials were earned. It does not renew any specialist certifications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *