How I passed the Hortonworks Data Platform Certified Administrator (HDPCA) exam
Good day! I have been reading Habr for a long time, but I still could not write everything. I recently passed the HDPCA (Hortonworks Data Platform Certified Administrator) exam and would like to share my impressions. I hope that this information will be useful to someone, because Even in English there is not much information about this exam.
It all started with the fact that not so long ago I changed the company - a small ambitious startup that wants to grow into a large partner of Hortonworks, a company known in some circles. Since a certain number of certified specialists are required to maintain status, we didn’t have much choice. In a week of relative respite, the chief set the task “must pass”.
I started the training with listing of exam objectives and studying materials on the official website. In addition to publicly available tutorials, the portal Hortonworks University is also available for partners, many of whose courses are very watery, but the first part of the Administration is pretty good. This course also includes a variety of labs covering 80% of the exam topics. Having passed the relevant tutorials on the site and the labs of the course, I found that some of the topics of the exam were still not covered. Then I came to the aid of the ITversity channel on Youtube. The channel has a separate HDPCA playlist - it has everything you need to pass the exam. The channel is very informative and the presentation of the material is not very different from the materials for partners. It also tells you how to raise a cluster in the cloud, if you have nothing to train for locally.
To give an idea of ​​what the environment is for taking the exam, Hortonworks provides a so-called. practice exam. This is a ready-made AMI image in Amazon AWS, which can be raised there in the cloud and get a 100% copy of the environment that will be on the exam. The questions given for example in the practice exam are not even close in complexity to what you have to face, so you shouldn’t be guided by them. Working on a virtual machine in the Amazon AWS cloud is not a particularly cheap pleasure, since in order for this stand to work tolerably, it has to be deployed on fairly powerful and expensive machines. In the end, I played with him for a couple of hours and redeemed, continuing with more detailed study and experiments on the local virtual machine.
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So, you have gone through all the material, have played enough with the cluster and are ready to surrender. You will need to go to the site of the examiner, select the day and time of the exam, pay a fee of $ 250 and get a confirmation. At the time you have chosen at X, you need to be at the computer, in a relatively empty room (there should not be people in the immediate vicinity, it should not be a cafe, an open space office, etc.). 15 minutes before the start of the exam, you can already log in. All the time of the exam, the image of your camera and the picture of your desktop will be transferred to the assistant, incl. take care of fairly fast computer and channel. Before the exam, check the documents and ask to rotate the camera 360 degrees.
The exam lasts 2 hours and includes only practical tasks, no questions are asked on this exam. At the time of the exam, you are given remote access to the exact same virtual machine as you were in the practice exam, and a list of tasks that you need to complete. I had 7 tasks, but perhaps the number is different for different options. All tasks are made up of a list of topics given in exam objectives, but some are quite intricate - for example, I had a task of the following type: “we broke service X, find a configuration error and run itif you can, hahaha ”. The error in the end turned out to be simple, but under conditions of limited time and more than a thoughtful reaction of the system, it made me sweat decently. In general, the list of tasks made an impression of a very balanced one (complex tasks in it were compensated by simple ones) and completely solved in the allotted 2 hours. Percentage of 80% of the tasks in this exam is done through Ambari, but, as I said, the interface works remotely extremely slowly and at the same time takes much more time than planned.
In the event of a connection break, the exam time stops - everything is fair here. Communication with the consultant is available in the chat, but on the subject of the exam, it is pointless to ask him - his task is to follow the rules and stop attempts to dishonestly pass. By the way, this is warned in advance that during any such attempt the exam will be terminated.
During this exam, you will have access to all documentation on docs.hortonworks.com - including. No need to cram teams and keys, just make sure you know how and where to quickly find the necessary information in the documentation (in which sections to look for it). The virtualka exam is set up under a fairly high resolution of the screen and I strongly recommend installing FullHD resolution and a 100% increase in Windows before the exam, if you don’t want the entire exam to move scrollers and wait for the screen update after that.
Before the end of the time, the assistant will write you in the chat for 10 minutes, as far as I have seen, there is no separate timer. After the exam is over, it takes up to 5 days until your exam is manually checked and a “letter of happiness” falls on your mail.
That's all, good luck on the exam. If you have questions, I will be glad to answer in the comments.
Useful links:
It all started with the fact that not so long ago I changed the company - a small ambitious startup that wants to grow into a large partner of Hortonworks, a company known in some circles. Since a certain number of certified specialists are required to maintain status, we didn’t have much choice. In a week of relative respite, the chief set the task “must pass”.
I started the training with listing of exam objectives and studying materials on the official website. In addition to publicly available tutorials, the portal Hortonworks University is also available for partners, many of whose courses are very watery, but the first part of the Administration is pretty good. This course also includes a variety of labs covering 80% of the exam topics. Having passed the relevant tutorials on the site and the labs of the course, I found that some of the topics of the exam were still not covered. Then I came to the aid of the ITversity channel on Youtube. The channel has a separate HDPCA playlist - it has everything you need to pass the exam. The channel is very informative and the presentation of the material is not very different from the materials for partners. It also tells you how to raise a cluster in the cloud, if you have nothing to train for locally.
To give an idea of ​​what the environment is for taking the exam, Hortonworks provides a so-called. practice exam. This is a ready-made AMI image in Amazon AWS, which can be raised there in the cloud and get a 100% copy of the environment that will be on the exam. The questions given for example in the practice exam are not even close in complexity to what you have to face, so you shouldn’t be guided by them. Working on a virtual machine in the Amazon AWS cloud is not a particularly cheap pleasure, since in order for this stand to work tolerably, it has to be deployed on fairly powerful and expensive machines. In the end, I played with him for a couple of hours and redeemed, continuing with more detailed study and experiments on the local virtual machine.
')
So, you have gone through all the material, have played enough with the cluster and are ready to surrender. You will need to go to the site of the examiner, select the day and time of the exam, pay a fee of $ 250 and get a confirmation. At the time you have chosen at X, you need to be at the computer, in a relatively empty room (there should not be people in the immediate vicinity, it should not be a cafe, an open space office, etc.). 15 minutes before the start of the exam, you can already log in. All the time of the exam, the image of your camera and the picture of your desktop will be transferred to the assistant, incl. take care of fairly fast computer and channel. Before the exam, check the documents and ask to rotate the camera 360 degrees.
The exam lasts 2 hours and includes only practical tasks, no questions are asked on this exam. At the time of the exam, you are given remote access to the exact same virtual machine as you were in the practice exam, and a list of tasks that you need to complete. I had 7 tasks, but perhaps the number is different for different options. All tasks are made up of a list of topics given in exam objectives, but some are quite intricate - for example, I had a task of the following type: “we broke service X, find a configuration error and run it
In the event of a connection break, the exam time stops - everything is fair here. Communication with the consultant is available in the chat, but on the subject of the exam, it is pointless to ask him - his task is to follow the rules and stop attempts to dishonestly pass. By the way, this is warned in advance that during any such attempt the exam will be terminated.
During this exam, you will have access to all documentation on docs.hortonworks.com - including. No need to cram teams and keys, just make sure you know how and where to quickly find the necessary information in the documentation (in which sections to look for it). The virtualka exam is set up under a fairly high resolution of the screen and I strongly recommend installing FullHD resolution and a 100% increase in Windows before the exam, if you don’t want the entire exam to move scrollers and wait for the screen update after that.
Before the end of the time, the assistant will write you in the chat for 10 minutes, as far as I have seen, there is no separate timer. After the exam is over, it takes up to 5 days until your exam is manually checked and a “letter of happiness” falls on your mail.
That's all, good luck on the exam. If you have questions, I will be glad to answer in the comments.
Useful links:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/320586/
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