The Cloud Engineer Bootcamp certification: Thoughts and takeaways

Cyber Monday on all LF certifications and https://bit.ly/2KUvsRD

Edit: There is a 65% discount running until end of Dec 8th 2020

A couple of weeks ago, I came across the Cloud Engineer Bootcamp certification from the Linux Foundation. What attracted my attention is the current offer, available until June 17, 2020, where for a total of 600$, you get access to a compilation of training and 2 certifications from LF. So i’m writing this post to answer three questions: What is it about, will this make you a Cloud Engineer and is it worth it ?!

What is this certification ?

The LF Cloud Engineer bootcamp is a 6 months program during which you will learn various pieces of technology and attempt to land two certifications: The Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) and the certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam (CKA) for a total of 600$ until June 17, 2020 (1000$ when the promotion expires).

What’s included ?

Quite a lot actually! There are 5 trainings:

• Essentials of Linux System Administration (LFS201)
• Linux Networking and Administration (LFS211)
• Containers Fundamentals (LFS253)
• DevOps and SRE Fundamentals (LFS261)
• Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258)

And two certifications, the LFCS and the CKA.

If you get this program bundle, you have 1 year access to the online courses and 1 year to use the exam vouchers with 1 free retake of each exam. This means that even if the program is structured for 6 months, at a pace of 15/20 hours per week (according to the landing page), in reality you can take the classes in any order you want and you have an entire year to study the content and pass the exams.

Will this make me a Cloud Engineer ?

he short answer is NO, the longer one is MAYBE or it DEPENDS.

Let’s start by acknowledging that there is no clear definition of what a Cloud Engineer is.The meaning of the title could vary depending on where you work and what you do. To explain myself let’s consider two people, myself and my imaginary friend Dave. I’m a Cloud Engineer at Google and my friend Dave is a Cloud Engineer at a leading videos streaming service company called cats-stream.com

My friend Dave’s company uses ABC as their cloud provider. What Dave does day to day could be split into two buckets, operations and builds:

• With his builds hat, he spends time helping other teams within the company adopt the new CI/CD pipeline his team built and is responsible for. He works with the teams to setup the build and delivery configuration repos, write some yaml files that describe the pipelines, automate part of the config, and help them troubleshoot issues.
• With his ops hats on, he is OnCall for the CI/CD pipeline once a month for 4 days. So whenever something goes wrong, the monitoring system they put in place will page his phone and he has to login to the monitoring dashboards, fire up a shell and start troubleshooting following a pre-defined playbook.

So my friend Dave’s role is somewhere close to what the industry defines as DevOps or SRE. Dave has both system administrator and developer skills that allow him to do his job.

I, on the other hand, work for Professional Services which is the consulting part of Google Cloud. I work with customers to help them onboard into our cloud platform. I could be spending one day trying out something with Kubernetes or Istio, setting up a proof of concept or helping a developer debug something on their existing projects, or I could be delivering or receiving trainings.

I’m more of a consultant/technical advisor. But in order to perform this role, I have to learn and try things and that is where I use my coding and system admin skills to achieve my goals.

So the industry has really no way of defining what a Cloud Engineer is. However, from the two descriptions above, we can deduct that my friend Dave and I need some common skills to perform our jobs, pertaining to System Administration, Containers, Container Orchestration… And that’s precisely what this certification is about, equipping you with the basic knowledge you need to land a job in the Cloud Industry.

Is it worth it ?

The simple answer is YES IF YOU ARE COMMITTED.

Let’s admit it, we all have purchased some online training we never used, due to the lack of time or procrastination. i’m have done it for sure.

So if I’m thinking of dedicating time and money on this, it would help to answer these two questions: Are LF certifications and trainings good ? Is it worth the money ?

Are LF certs and trainings any good ?

• I have passed many certifications in my career. I acquired CCNA (Cisco) and LPI (Linux Professional Institute) among others and passed the LFCS and CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer). I do like the LF certifications a lot for many reasons: they are practical (you sit in front of you computer with access to a terminal and a proctor monitoring you remotely), they are flexible since you can choose the time slot and the day you want to pass your exam on (in comparison to CCNA where I had to book a time to go to an exam center which is not necessarily open outside of business hours or on weekends!), and they are quite affordable.
• The trainings on the other hand weren’t my cup of tea.. They are not very bad but they are not engaging either and could be quite monotonic. I did however use my linuxacademy.com account to get some extra info before going to the LF exams. From my experience, most trainings you buy from organizations that also sell certifications are essentially focused on teaching you what you need to know to pass the exam. So if you are taking the CKA to learn k8s, expect to only have the basics from this exam. You will undeniably need to learn quite a lot later, in your own time.
• Edit: I spoke to somebody from the Linux Foundation and they said they are working hard on making sure the training content is informative and goes beyond just the test content, i also acknowledge that trainings are not easy and writing a comprehensive content is difficult, we humans also learn differently (some of us like more visual content than text, some like to practice than listen or read). So when it comes into trainings there is no one size fit all, it depends on your preferences.

Are they worth it ?

If we look at it from the sole monetary value point of view, then YES! Here is a breakdown of what’s included and how much you will have to pay if you buy these trainings and certifications individually:

• Essentials of Linux System Administration (LFS201) retails for 299$
• Linux Networking and Administration (LFS211) retails for 299$
• Containers Fundamentals (LFS253) retails for 299$
• DevOps and SRE Fundamentals (LFS261) retails for 299$
• Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258) retails for 299$
• LFCS Certification retails for 300$
• CKA certification retails for 300$

So the grand Total would be ~2100$. However there are couple of bundles that could bring this cost down further, especially for the Certifications.So instead of buying the exams and courses separately, you would normally opt for the bundles:

• Essentials of Linux System Administration (LFS201)+ LFCS bundle for 499$.
• Linux Networking and Administration (LFS211) + LFCS bundle for 499$
• Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258) + CKA bundle for 499$ (I could not find a link to the bundle page for this one but if you scroll down a bit you will find the button to get the combo).

Of course you don’t need to buy the LFS201 and LFS211 bundles because you will end up with two vouchers for the same exam.

So considering you will get one of these bundles with the Kubernetes one and all the other trainings, the total would be around 1900$. I would then argue that even without the current discount of around 400$, the deal is pretty damn good! Plus, you will end up with a brand new badge you can proudly display on your profile ;)

That’s all the thoughts I have on the LF Cloud Engineer Bootcamp certification. I hope this helps clarify things for you! Let me know in the comments or DM me on twitter.com/boredabdel if you have any follow-up questions :)