training.

The performance-based RHCSA exam (EX200) tests system administration skills common across a wide range of environments. It is the mandatory prerequisite for RHCE and the starting point for every Red Hat certification track.

official exam domains

1. Essential tools — shell access, I/O redirection, grep/regex, SSH, user switching, archiving, file management, permissions, system docs
2. Software management — RPM and Flatpak repositories, install & remove packages
3. Shell scripts — conditionals, loops, arguments, command substitution
4. Operate running systems — boot/reboot, boot targets, interrupt boot, processes, tuning profiles, logs & journals, network services, SCP/SFTP
5. Local storage — GPT partitions, LVM (PV/VG/LV), UUID/label mounts, swap
6. File systems — VFAT/ext4/xfs, NFS, autofs, extending LVs, permission diagnosis
7. Deploy & maintain — at/cron/systemd timers, services, time sync, package updates, bootloader
8. Networking — IPv4/IPv6, hostname resolution, services at boot, firewalld/firewall-cmd
9. Users & groups — local users/groups, password aging, sudo
10. Security — firewalld, default permissions, SSH keys, SELinux (modes, contexts, booleans), containers

Who it's for: Anyone starting the Red Hat path; experienced Linux admins seeking formal validation; DevOps engineers needing container fundamentals.

EX294 tests the ability to write and execute Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform playbooks to configure, manage, and automate RHEL systems. Counts as one of the five specialist credentials toward RHCA.

official exam domains

1. Perform all tasks expected of an RHCSA
2. Install & configure AAP — packages, ansible.cfg, inventories, privilege escalation
3. VSCode + Ansible integration for playbook development
4. Inventories — static files, host groups, host/group variables
5. Run playbooks — ad-hoc commands, task order, tags
6. Variables & facts — magic variables, Jinja2 templates
7. Task control — loops, conditionals (when), handlers, blocks, error handling
8. File deployment — copy/template, file content, SELinux context
9. Software, users, services, networking, storage via Ansible modules
10. Roles & collections — Ansible Galaxy, content collections
11. Ansible Vault — encrypt secrets, vault passwords in playbooks

Who it's for: RHCSA holders moving into automation; admins managing RHEL fleets; DevOps / IaC engineers.

EX342 tests the ability to analyse RHEL systems for issues causing degradation or loss of service — and either fix them directly or produce forensic data for escalation.

study points

• Apply a structured, scientific approach to troubleshooting
• Diagnose & resolve boot failures — GRUB2, systemd targets, initrd/dracut
• Investigate hardware and driver problems
• Storage subsystem failures — LVM, DM-Multipath, filesystem corruption
• Resolve RPM and software management problems
• Debug network connectivity and service failures
• Remediate security misconfigs — SELinux denials, firewall rules
• Analyse third-party / application failures using logs and tracing
• Kernel-level diagnostics — vmcore/crash, kernel parameters, oops decoding
• Diagnostic tooling — sosreport, journalctl, strace, lsof, perf, sar, abrt

Who it's for: Senior Linux admins; L2/L3 support engineers; anyone diagnosing complex production RHEL failures.

EX442 tests the ability to use standard tools to analyse and modify the behaviour of RHEL and its applications to maximise performance.

study points

• Obtain, analyse, and interpret system performance metrics
• Apply tuned profiles for workload-specific configuration
• Tune CPU scheduling, NUMA topology, process/interrupt affinity
• Memory — hugepages, transparent hugepages, swap, OOM, page cache
• Storage I/O — disk schedulers, queue depth, mount options
• Network stack — socket buffers, NIC offloading, DPDK / SR-IOV basics
• Profile app & kernel — perf, flamegraphs, SystemTap, eBPF / bpftrace
• Identify bottlenecks across CPU, memory, I/O, network
• sar/sysstat for capacity planning & trending
• Tune kernel parameters at runtime & persistently via sysctl

Who it's for: Experienced Linux admins maximising utilisation; SREs dealing with latency or throughput; engineers on the RHCA path.

EX210 tests skills needed to create, configure, and manage private clouds using RHEL and Red Hat OpenStack Platform — focused on day-to-day operations of a running cluster.

study points

• Manage the Red Hat OpenStack Platform control plane
• Users, projects, roles, quotas (Keystone)
• VM lifecycle (Nova) — flavours, images, live migration
• Networking (Neutron) — networks, subnets, routers, floating IPs, security groups
• Block storage (Cinder) — volumes & snapshots
• Images & metadata (Glance)
• Object storage (Swift) — containers and objects
• Monitor services & troubleshoot failed components
• Orchestration with Heat stacks
• Day-2 — scaling, maintenance, service recovery

Who it's for: Sysadmins / operators of OpenStack-based private clouds; RHCE holders moving into cloud operations.

EX188 tests the ability to find, customise, run, and manage containerised services in standalone environments using Podman. No prerequisites; RHCSA recommended.

official exam domains

1. Build images with Containerfiles — FROM, RUN, ADD vs COPY, WORKDIR, USER, ENV, EXPOSE; security & user context
2. Manage images — pull/push to public & private registries; auth; Podman, Buildah, Skopeo
3. Run containers — rootful & rootless; env vars, ports, names; start/stop/remove; exec into running
4. Persist data — bind mounts, named volumes, SELinux labelling, lifecycle & cleanup
5. Multi-container apps — Podman Compose, service dependencies
6. Containers as systemd services — generate units / Quadlet; rootless services at login
7. Inspect & troubleshoot — logs, events, podman inspect, debug failing containers / builds
8. Deploy on OpenShift — push to OCP registry, create & expose deployments

Who it's for: Developers, sysadmins, DevOps new to containers; gateway to the EX280 OpenShift track.

EX280 tests the ability to create, configure, and manage a cloud application platform using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

official exam domains

1. Manage OCP — web console & oc CLI; cluster operators; updates & config
2. Users & policies — HTPasswd identity provider; users, groups; cluster admins
3. Access control — RBAC (Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings); SCCs; service accounts
4. Networking — SDN/OVN-Kubernetes; Routes (edge / passthrough / re-encrypt); NetworkPolicy
5. Pod scheduling — node selectors, affinity, taints/tolerations; quotas, LimitRanges; project templates
6. App deployment — CLI, console, Helm, Kustomize; ConfigMaps & Secrets; rolling deploys / rollback
7. Persistent storage — PV/PVC; StorageClasses; dynamic provisioning
8. Troubleshoot — failing pods, quota violations, network & auth failures; cluster & operator logs

Who it's for: Linux admins moving into OpenShift / cloud-native ops; SREs and cluster operators; RHCA via the OpenShift route.

EX288 tests the ability to deploy and manage existing applications in OpenShift Container Platform. Programming experience strongly recommended.

official exam domains

1. Work with images — imagestreams; Skopeo to inspect / copy / mirror
2. Build apps — Source-to-Image (S2I); manage builds; custom Containerfiles; binary builds
3. Deploy apps — Deployments & DeploymentConfigs; rolling vs recreate; rollback; HPA
4. Health — liveness, readiness, startup probes
5. Configuration — env vars, ConfigMaps, Secrets injected at runtime
6. Networking & routing — Routes; TLS termination types; Ingress
7. Persistent storage — request and use PVCs in workloads
8. Helm & Kustomize — Helm charts; Kustomize overlays / patches
9. CI/CD — OpenShift Pipelines (Tekton) basics; trigger from source events

Who it's for: Developers and DevOps shipping applications on OpenShift; anyone responsible for app CI/CD on Red Hat's Kubernetes platform.

EX374 tests the ability to develop advanced Ansible automation at scale using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5.

official exam domains

1. Manage code with Git — clone, branch, commit, push; integrate with Automation Controller projects
2. Best practices — directory structure, naming, variable precedence, modular role design
3. Advanced data manipulation — lookup plugins, query functions, complex loops, filters
4. Network & complex data — Jinja2 filters, json_query, community filters
5. Execution environments — build with ansible-builder; push to private hub; run via ansible-navigator
6. Automation Controller — orgs, users, teams, permissions; inventories & credentials; projects, job & workflow templates
7. Automation hub — publish & consume private collections; private Galaxy
8. Rolling updates — serial, max_fail_percentage, delegate_to

Who it's for: RHCE holders going deeper at enterprise scale; platform engineers automating multi-team workflows; the RHCA Ansible track.

2-hour, 100% hands-on exam from CNCF / Linux Foundation. Every task is solved in a real cluster terminal — no multiple choice.

domains & weights

• 25%Cluster Architecture, Install & Config — RBAC, kubeadm install/upgrade, lifecycle, Helm/Kustomize, CNI/CSI/CRI, CRDs & operators, Gateway API
• 15%Workloads & Scheduling — Deployments, rolling updates & rollbacks, ConfigMaps/Secrets, HPA/VPA, scheduling, requests/limits, DaemonSets, StatefulSets
• 20%Services & Networking — Service types, Ingress & Gateway API, CoreDNS, NetworkPolicy, CNI plugin operation
• 10%Storage — StorageClasses, dynamic provisioning, volume types & access modes, PV/PVC, reclaim policies
• 30%Troubleshooting — control-plane failures (apiserver, etcd, scheduler, kubelet), node failures, workloads, network, logging

Who it's for: Platform engineers, DevOps/SRE, and cloud infra admins managing or building Kubernetes clusters.

2-hour, hands-on exam focused on application lifecycle rather than cluster administration. No prerequisites.

domains & weights

• 20%App Design & Build — OCI images, init containers, multi-container patterns (sidecar/adapter/ambassador), volumes, Jobs & CronJobs
• 20%App Deployment — strategies (rolling, recreate, blue/green, canary), Helm, Kustomize, rollouts & rollback
• 15%Observability & Maintenance — probes, API deprecations, metrics & logs, debugging
• 25%Environment, Config & Security — ConfigMaps/Secrets, requests/limits, ServiceAccounts, SecurityContext, RBAC
• 20%Services & Networking — Services, Ingress, NetworkPolicy, in-cluster DNS

Who it's for: Software engineers deploying on Kubernetes; DevOps building CI/CD into Kubernetes; anyone writing manifests day-to-day.

2-hour, 100% hands-on exam. Requires a current CKA before booking. Covers the full attack surface of a production cluster.

domains & weights

• 10%Cluster Setup — CIS benchmark, network policies, GUI restrictions, verifying platform binaries
• 15%Cluster Hardening — RBAC least privilege, service account restrictions, update cadence & CVE patching
• 15%System Hardening — OS attack-surface reduction, AppArmor & seccomp, restrict kernel capabilities
• 20%Minimize Microservice Vulns — SecurityContext, Pod Security Standards, secrets management, multi-tenancy & sandboxing (gVisor, kata), mTLS
• 20%Supply Chain — base image minimisation, image scanning (Trivy), allowlist registries, signing & verification
• 20%Monitoring, Logging, Runtime — Falco, audit logs & policy, container immutability, incident response

Who it's for: Senior DevOps / platform engineers responsible for security posture; security engineers hardening production clusters; CKA holders moving into security.