Hi Everyone,

I went quiet for a few days which had some people wondering whether I had fallen into one of my Burke “everything is depressing moods” that come gleefully with middle age, but in fact I was feverishly torturing myself with learning monitoring. Prometheus is a powerful monitoring tool and can be leveraged in my many circumstances, including of course Kubernetes. 

I knew this certification was going to be a challenge as monitoring loves precision whereas I am by nature more of an “on the spot, off campus” type of personality thriving when it comes to figuring out fixes or trying to think out of the box which I think in my cases according to my early grade school teachers, there was never any box present in the first place.

Forcing yourself to study things that are not necessarily in your natural skillset is always very useful as it stretches your mind which can only make you stronger in the end. Like brushing your teeth with the wrong hand. Yes at first it will be messy and unpleasant but after a while you get quite good at it. New neural paths are formed and you will be able to use your wrong hand much more effectively at other things.

Back to the PCA. The Linux Foundation recently introduced the PCA exam because of the continuing growing popularity of the software. 

One thing I like about certifications is that they force you to study the software as a whole and not just learn “a la google” during daily ad hoc activities. 

For my exam preparations I used Kodekloud’s excellent PCA course and I bought 4 practice exams on Udemy. I also googled and found some exam reports from people who had taken the exam which were also helpful

The exam is multiple choice but quite challenging. You are given 90 minutes to answer 60 questions which was more than enough. I marked for review about 25 questions 10 of which I was very unsure about due to the answers being all very close to correct (reminded me of the VMCA exam). 

One unfortunate thing is that you have to wait 24 hours for your result. While I understand the reasoning behind this for the Linux Admin, CKA, CKAD, CKS exams, since they are performance based, I don’t see why the multiple choice exam needed that long for review. You spend 24 hours second guessing your answers and preparing for the worst! Wait that is just Geoff’s mid life view point talking.. One should just do as the the old song stated “Be happy, Don’t worry!!”