Likely we are are all familiar with Red Hat's RHCSA. But now there is The Linux Foundation's LFCS which seems rather similar with a choice of distro/flavor concentrations i.e. CentOS, OpenSUSE or Ubuntu.
If you all had a choice (and assuming you do not already have either or had to do one again) which would you choose?
RHCSA has more pedigree and recognition (and also tests for RHEL 7 in new version) but LFCS seems like a "hip" new choice.
Posted Aug 26, 2014, 2:31 PM UTC
The certs are more to make it past HR than anything else. I would still stick with RHCSA for not since it is the most common and likely a key word the person in HR filtering out resumes is looking for.
Red Hat certifications are the standard.
Agreed. I hope that the Linux Foundation stuff proves viable in the long term, but right now and for the foreseeable future, business looks to RedHat when it looks for Linux certs.
Really? I would say that LPIC is the new standard.
Seriously? I've never seen where an employer gives two shits about LPIC, but have seen many which ask for RHCSA or RHCE.
Interesting. My experience is the opposite. Guess it depend on who you ask.
I would rather compare the LFCS and LFCE with LPI certifications (similar but not fully with LPIC-1 and LPIC-2). Though I am also waiting for more information about how the two exams look like. LPI (lpi.org) were the ones to introduce the idea of agnostic exams (they test both Debian and RedHat knowledge). Though RHEL has a long history and has created an important name for themselvs, they are, of course, very RedHat specific.
Hello!
Took the LFCS a couple of days ago. Interesting test. The content was as expected (mostly LPIC-1 with a couple of things from LPIC-2).
The exam interface is was aweful. You could say it's still very beta. I sent an email to the LF certification team regarding the issues with it and they say they'll role out some improvements in the next months.
The exam has a lot of potential. But needs a lot of work. I would give it a year or so before it can have a chance to take off. After that, probably LPI and LF will go head to head for the market.
Depends upon your reason for getting it, but if it's job related, LFCS has 29 hits on dice, whereas RHCSA/RHCE have a couple hundred, so I'd go with the latter.
Getting a job (or a better one) is indeed my motivation.
You gave me an interesting idea though. Since Red Hat and SUSE have their own certification, it might be good to get the LFCS for Ubuntu to have all bases covered. Might be a bit excessive though come to think about it.
Companies aren't so much concerned with which distro you are familiar with, there are differences but they are mostly minor and can easily be figured out by any sysadmin. The certifications are more about narrowing down job applicants than anything else.
Doing that won't hurt you, but your time might be better employed getting either more advanced RedHat certs, such as Engineer or Virtualization Administrator; or more diverse certs, such as Security+, Cisco, etc.
Few to no employers are going to look at an RHCE and think, "but we run Ubuntu -- will he be able to cope with the slightly different place in /etc that smb.conf is stored?" They're much more likely to think, "oh thank merciful Christ, not another paper MCSE who ran cygwin once."
But in the long term LFCS will be better, also many cloud services are deployed in more than one distro environment.
Maybe, but I doubt it. That never proved true for the Linux+ cert, and the Red Hat ones are pretty entrenched regarding corporate job requirements.
Yeah, extremely doubtful. I heard this same argument as far as networking certifications. Some people claim Network+ is better than a CCNA because it's vendor-neutral. No one in the industry takes Network+ seriously, but a CCNA can get you a very decent entry-level job.
Possibly, but for the here and now, RedHat is what companies know to look for. No one should be looking for the certification that might possibly look sort of good on a resume in a few years maybe. If it looks good in a few years, get it then. Until then, don't waste your time, go with what you know employers want today.