Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and process that I took. The sample scenario that I covered below are not a replica of the examination. It will guide you to look into where to find the issue given the scenario and diagnose the containers to recover the services.
I took my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers (31 Jan 2025) today and passed. Thanks to the online resources around which I found pretty helpful as a practice. I scored 282/300. Alittle short on my expectations, thought i’ll get closer to 300/300. Honestly, since RHCSC is a short course, everything you need to know is covered within the training course. It was relatively easy as I’ve been using linux / docker / docker-compose almost on a daily/weekly basis. Here are some tips/materials that are useful to me:-
- Useful Videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqha1dwA-TY&list=PLnFCwVWiQz4lbdsIPt_eqnNd3-p2we0qd&index=6
- Pluralsight https://app.pluralsight.com/ilx/video-courses/abfd81a6-ee7b-4478-b1ad-69def9c61763/48c93c1f-1a96-44a2-ab99-b2795d522e47/a0795cee-a47d-4804-934f-267f01a48852
- Especially for troubleshooting containers, the labs provided good enough starting ground on where to begin.
- Do run through all the labs provided in the course at least 2 times and understand what you are doing.
- Immerse your head into the apps (i.e., nginx/mariadb) running within the container to know how they function.
I managed to finish first 5 questions in under 1 hour, but the troubleshooting containers took me a while as I had to dive into areas where I don’t often look into.
You are not allowed to sudo on the host machine, making troubleshooting one step harder. So, running sudo nsenter ss -pant is not possible, although this is really useful when container does not have the installed packages required for troubleshooting. I also tried to netstat, to no avail.
Alright, I hope I get sometime infuture to guide the juniors on how to ace it.