Dear all, I hope the new year started off well for you. We do have quite a few development projects to tackle this year, one of them is the objectives review of LPIC-2. We will also review the DevOps Tools Engineer this year, but we should get started with LPIC-2 first. However, already considering potential changes to the DevOps Tools Engineer while adjusting LPIC-2 is important to ensure our overall program stays consistent.
Let’s go! The current objectives are on the wiki: https://wiki.lpi.org/wiki/LPIC-2_Objectives_V4.5 The page already contains some future change considerations, including some contents that will likely be removed from the exam. But please feel free to bring up *any* aspect you’d like to discuss. This explicitly includes weight changes if you feel some topics should be tested at another level. However, there are two rather general concerns that I would like to point out explicitly: One of them is configuration automation. Manual administration is clearly often not the preferred way to administer systems, so it might be a good idea to include some portions of it in LPIC-2. We do already have a topic on this in the DevOps Tools Engineer (topic 704, 10 weights in total!) which may serve as a baseline for a similar topic in LPIC-2. Another trend is containerization. This is a thin line, since the LPIC track is still closely aligned to system administration, while Podman, Docker, et. al. include far more aspects, like application packaging, building tools. Adding these topics in detail to LPIC would require a lot of room and actually change the program’s characteristics. However, we still have the DevOps Tools Engineer exam, which is due for review in 2022, too. If (!) we decide to add configuration automation to LPIC-2, we would be able to turn the DevOps Tools Engineer more towards a container focused exam. The focus would rather lean towards cloud native technologies and the intersection of system and software engineering, while LPIC-3 would focus on the lower level aspects of the related technologies. I think this idea is worth a thought for various reasons: We would get an up to date LPIC-2, addressing mastery of Linux, with the most recent tools, as well as another certification addressing the now commonly used ‘cloud native stack’ (for the lack of a better word), with the latter being available without prerequisites to anyone doing cloud native development. The new DevOps Tools Engineer would contain less topics, be more focused and hence be more attractive than the current version; LPIC-2 would be freed from some legacy/now less important topics (I cannot imagine FTP and Squid surviving the review (feel free to prove me wrong :)) and include configuration automation while still covering what’s going on under the hood (again, feel free to prove me wrong). Looking forward to your thoughts, Fabian -- Fabian Thorns <[email protected]> GPG: F1426B12 Director of Product Development, Linux Professional Institute _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] https://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
