EX221

Just passed EX221 and became Red Hat Certified Specialist in Cloud-native Integration. One of the most challenging exams so far, especially for someone who knows Java as little as I do. It is based on Fuse 7.10 and Apache Camel 2.23.2, in case anyone needs to know an exact version to prepare for (this is a publicly available info).

Apache Camel is a library that implements a wide spectrum of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) for different integration scenarios by providing over 180 components, ranging from file that allows your application to consume files from a file system, to http that is used to call an external service (such as REST API) to bean that provides a way to invoke a Java bean for message processing. It helps developers to integrate their applications in a decentralized and agile fashion, avoiding a central integration layer, like ESB - a solution very common for waterfall era. I was impressed by the number of options it gives you, especially in the area of processing messages and various expression languages it supports - XPath, JsonPath, Simple, and a dozen of others. You can also combine messages together according to an arbitrary criteria, like header, or enrich them using data from an external source.

I'm not going to pretend I know more than I do about Camel and this is not the technology I normally work with on my projects, but the knowledge I acquired preparing for the exam helped me see a bigger picture and put it in the context of what many businesses need these days. I had a customer that used Fuse and Kafka on OpenShift 4, so it's only logical to take EX482 next.

For the detailed list of components and their versions included in that release of Fuse, see https://access.redhat.com/articles/348423.