A quick note to express my gratitude and relief on passing the ‘Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator’ exam (EX280).

Tips that really helped me out:

Use the web UI

As a self admitted CLI snob I went into the prep for this exam assuming doing everything in the CLI was the way to go. But to the OpenShift teams credit, they’ve done a great job on the web UI. It has all the primitives that you need to manage the cluster and more crucially, contains a yaml editor with basic validation that helps keep you on track while editing resources. Some adhoc operations (of which the exam basically is) are simply faster or easier to do using the UI than the CLI. That said, there are a variety of scenarios where it makes sense to use the CLI, so I agree with the general advice of “use both”.

Use ‘oc explain’

I’d hoped to not need this during the exam, but when under pressure it’s invaluable. Some of the questions can ask you to configure properties you may not have come across (it’s hard to cover all), so it’s almost like they expect you to know how utilise this tool. Again, the web UI comes in handy here, as there’s a side bar of oc explain while editing a resource.

Know identity inside out

Groups, Users, and RBAC feature heavily in DO280, so it’s no surprise they’re key to the exam. While Roles/ClusterRoles feel intuitive, OCs abstraction on them gave me many a pause during prep. So practice this a lot, using both UI and CLI.

Shout out to DevOps-Wala

I found his scenarios very helpful, I would consider his EX280 playlist on YouTube essential watching for the exam.

Closing

Overall you need a solid combination of CKA and DO280, that was my expectation going in and has lined up with my experience. I enjoyed the DO280 labs and found them quite well put together. Best of luck for your next exam.