My experience in passing the Certified Openstack Administrator Exam (COA)

After working for a few years with the open source cloud computing infrastructure software project Openstack, the time was right to get formally certified. The way to do so currently (2022), is by taking the Openstack Administrator Exam, offered by Mirantis.

General details about the exam

• Duration: 3 hours
• A passing score of 70% or higher is required.
• No retakes allowed.
• Cost: $400, and the exam is scheduled on the available dates by the candidates at the time of purchase
• All of the exams are virtual and hosted through Zoom.
• Candidates are required to provide a means of photo identification before the Exam can be launched.
• Offered only in the English language.
• Based on the OpenStack Rocky release.
• You can't use external resources anymore (not even docs.openstack.org)!
• Exams are scored automatically and a score report is made available within three (3) business days. You are notified via email with your score and certification-related information.??
• The certification is valid for 36 months from the exam date.

Topics

• Identity Management (Keystone): It has a weightage of 15% for the exam.
• Compute (Nova): It has a weightage of 35% for the exam.
• Object Storage (Swift): It has a weightage of 5% for the exam.
• Block Storage (Cinder): It has a weightage of 10% for the exam.
• Networking (Neutron): It has a weightage of 30% for the exam.
• Image Management (Glance): It has a weightage of 5% for the exam.

Preparation

I used the following resources (honestly, there is not much out there, which is also one of the reasons I wanted to write this post):

• PDF version of the book Preparing for The COA exam, by Matt Dorn, from Packt Publishing: This was my principal resource. I read the PDF several times and went frequently through the sample questions and final sample questions. Bear in mind that this book was written with Openstack Newton in mind, so a few things have changed since then (the exam currently uses Rocky), not only in commands or screens, but also in exam topics (Heat isn't anymore in the list!). The book also comes with a sample Openstack appliance, in .ova format, which can be downloaded from the GitHub page and installed on VirtualBox (the book explains how to do this; it's quite simple). You can use this sample appliance also to test scenarios or questions taken from other resources.
• The new COA (2019): introductory video
• COA requirements from the official site
• The Test Takers Guide to the Certified OpenStack Administrator: bit obsolete, but gives some good pointers
• General indications from Mirantis on the new exam
• Test exercices: (the hands-on ones are decent, forget about the multiple-choice ones; they were probably created for some older version of the exam.
• Tips for the exam: a bit obsolete.

I felt ready for the exam when I could quickly execute all question scenarios. In total I probably dedicated the evenings of two weeks to this preparation, but bear in mind I already had extensive knowledge of Openstack beforehand, so I only had to study more into detail about a few topics.

Tips & Hints

• Try to practice and solve the majority of the questions from Horizon UI, as it is faster as compared to solving them over Command-Line.?BUT: read further on why this is not the ideal idea. ;-)
• Some actions can only be done by CLI and not by GUI: Nova: domains, endpoints, service catalog // Glance: Share images with a project -> image add project, downloading glance images // Swift: Managing swift ACL rules and expiration dates
• Be prepared that you can only use the US English keyboard layout during the exam!
• https://www.openstack.org/coa/requirements/Lean how to use the screen command in the CLI: ctrl-a,S???-> Create split screen // ?ctrl-a, TAB?-> Go to split screen // ctrl-a, c??-> Create a new tab

Scheduling the exam

I initially thought scheduling an exam instance would be easy as just picking a date on the Openstack page, but to my surprise and desperation, when I checked, no exam dates were available! Luckily a few days later new dates were added, and I could book (pay immediately) the exam on a suitable date. You will receive a Google Calendar link with a Zoom meeting. Test whether you have Zoom installed and try a test call just to be sure everything is working properly.

(While I write this (June 2022), I still see available dates in the near future, so it seems there really is a demand for this exam. :-)

The exam itself

Note: The day before the exam, I received an email from Mirantis asking me if it was possible to postpone it until a new date, some 3-4 weeks into the future. Since I was completely ready for the exam, and didn't want to keep on studying, I kindly rejected this option and requested to proceed with the agreed date, which was finally accepted.

On the date/time of the exam I connected myself to the Zoom meeting, together with a bunch of other people and a Proctor. As we had to wait for everybody to become connected, we finally started 15m past the initial time (final time was extended accordingly). The Proctor indicated that we could have a pen or pencil and paper on our desk for notes, so I quickly grabbed some, which came in handy to jot down questions I doubted about or wanted to review. I wasn't asked to show my desktop or room on camera, and I remember it wasn't possible to share all my screens (but it wasn't an issue for the Proctor either).

And then we started...

The exam interface was rather straightforward and worked rather well. On the left a list of questions appeared and on the right, indications to connect to your GUI instance appeared. For the CLI connection, you just use SSH with your own client into an instance in the internet (this took me a few minutes to understand).

About the questions itself, they were more or less in line with the ones I had practiced, creating an Openstack project from scratch with projects, users, images, networks, keypairs, instances, etc. After about 1.5-2h I finalized and submitted my work, confident enough that I would pass.

A few strange things I want to mention about the exam questions:

• In some questions we were explicitly asked to do things ONLY through CLI (in spite of all the indications I had read about always stating to try to do things through GUI, because it's a lot faster). I suffered a bit with this, because I had heavily focused on the GUI and only for a few commands practiced with the CLI (and only for those typical commands that don't have a GUI equivalent), so I had to make extensive use of the --help function to find the necessary arguments...
• In one question we were asked to create a Heat stack, in spite of Heat not being part of the exam topics! Luckily I had done this before, and could execute the required actions, but I guess many people weren't so lucky and to be honest, I don't think that was fair. If it's not part of the curriculum, no question should be asked!
• In another question, we were asked to download a cloud image, but instead of providing the full link, we were given parts of the link (and each part had its own (not working) hyperlink), so this was quite confusing. What we had to do, was manually constructing the link out of the different link parts. I remember people in the exam chat not understanding how to do this, and frankly, this was unnecessary complicated.
• No question was asked about Swift. None. Very strange considering that the example questions about Swift require memorizing a couple CLI commands and as such is considered a tougher topic.
• No questions were asked about creating and using domains in Keystone. All questions were done in the same Openstack domain, so no need for CLI use on those questions.

Exam results

A few hours after the exam, I received my results by email. I passed but received a lower score than I had expected (and I still don't know which questions I failed); my theory is that Mirantis uses some automatic checking mechanism that doesn't take into account any small (but irrelevant) differences in answering. Hence, my advice is to try to answer as many questions, as complete as possible, in order to have some "contingency" for passing the exam.

Conclusion

I am glad I studied and obtained this certification, because during my learning phase I managed to get to know a few new things. :-)

I do have to say that I expected a higher exam quality from Mirantis: this is not a cheap certification (400 USD!) and all the little things that happened before and during the exam left me with a bit of bitter aftertaste. I hope the Openstack organization launches some kind of audit of the exam quality to address and finetune all the little issues I encountered.