Architect

After several years working as a technology generalist, providing everything from desktop support to network design and troubleshooting, I landed a job as a dedicated Linux system administrator. This job paid for me to attend official Red Hat training, and I earned the Red Hat Certified Engineer certification. The examination was a challenging hands-on test to prove that I knew about a wide range of Red Hat Linux technologies: troubleshooting boot devices, setting SELinux policies, managing users and the PAM stack, and more.

Several jobs later, I pursued additional Red Hat certifications, each of which required a non-trivial exam to prove I’d learned the material. The hardest of these was the course on performance tuning: I failed the test the first time I took it, and barely squeaked through on a second try. This course was also, probably, one of the single most valuable training experiences I had, as it covered kernel tunables, network stack tweaking, and disk I/O optimizations. I used the knowledge from this class quite a lot in the years to come.

After a total of five exams beyond RHCE, I earned the Red Hat Certified Architect title. Red Hat was extremely thorough in protecting this title, ensuring that people who earned it had demonstrated expertise. This wasn’t something that someone could fake their way through. It was also an expensive certification, requiring first RCHE status and then five more exam certifications. There’s a significant financial barrier to attaining this title.

Last week, I took the test for the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification. This was a 50 question multiple choice exam. I don’t know how well I did, as it’s simply pass/fail, but I passed. It was harder than I anticipated, but I admit I didn’t study particularly hard. I passed the sample exam with a score of 75% with zero preparation. I attribute most of my success to being generally familiar with cloud technologies over the last 10 years, and Google stuff specifically for the last year. And of course, my previous technical experiences helped me make plenty of educated guesses.

Despite the titles being the same, Red Hat’s and Google’s visions of “architect” are very different. Red Hat has the architect being the highest credentialed hands-on practioner, someone who can build and support and troubleshoot much of the Red Hat Linux ecosystem. Google has the architect being a well-rounded integrator of Google cloud services.

Google offers other certifications for various kinds of technical practitioners, which I may pursue later. But the nature of consuming cloud services means the level of technical sophistication required by any human is necessarily less than what a Red Hat Linux admin needs. There’s only so many knobs and levers exposed by Google to configure and maintain their offerings.

None of this is to say that one certification is better than the other. They’re different. I think Red Hat’s use of the title is the oddball, really. A professional building architect is not necessarily well versed in the technicalities of water flow, electrical design, carpet cleaning options, and everything else that goes into the long-term support of a phsyical building. (But maybe they are? I don’t really know what architects are taught, let alone what their jobs actually entail!)

One of the other big differences between these two certification paths was a focus on cost. Both money and budget were important aspects of the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification. This makes sense, of course, since cloud services are charged on usage. Quite a few of the exam questions asked for the most budget-conscious solution of several options. I don’t recall money or budget ever really being addressed in the Red Hat cert path.

Will the Google certification matter for me? It’s hard to say. The Red Hat Certified Architect title never really did anything for me, and I used only a small portion of the knowledge I gained through that process. I can talk about LDAP and x500 and (now very outdated) OpenStack and OpenShift technologies, but I never really leveraged those skills in a professional capacity. As stated above, performance tuning was the real heavy hitter of my certifications, and I absolutely used it directly and indirectly for years.