Infrastructure
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) #8 Error handling: block/rescue/always, failed_when, ignore_errors
The eighth post of the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) series. We cover the error handling that controls the flow when a playbook fails mid-run. From the exam point of view, we work through structuring exceptions with block/rescue/always, letting failures slide with ignore_errors, defining your own failure conditions with failed_when, and shoring up the idempotency of the command module with changed_when.
Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) #5: Local Storage 1 — Partitions, swap, LVM basics
The fifth post in the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) series. We check disks with lsblk and fdisk, create partitions with fdisk,parted, add swap with mkswap,swapon, build LVM with pvcreate,vgcreate,lvcreate, then mount it permanently with mkfs and fstab (UUID) — all typed out by hand. We carry RHCSA's most common task, "create an LVM and mount it," all the way through so it survives a reboot.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #6 Domain 1-5 Development with AWS Services — SDK Development Patterns
The fifth post of the DVA-C02 development domain. It covers the common patterns that recur when calling services with the AWS SDK: pagination, exponential backoff and jitter for handling throttling and transient errors, idempotency implementation, S3 multipart upload and presigned URLs, and the SDK credential provider chain along with region and retry configuration, all at the exam level.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) #15 Resource Management: requests/limits, QoS, LimitRange, ResourceQuota
The 15th post in the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) series. We lay out how requests and limits reserve and cap cpu and memory, the difference between CPU throttling and memory OOMKilled, and how the three QoS classes — Guaranteed, Burstable, BestEffort — decide eviction order. Then we work through the operational policies that enforce container defaults with LimitRange and namespace totals with ResourceQuota, all in YAML.
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) #10 Kustomize: The Overlay Pattern and Per-Environment Manifests
The tenth post in the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) series. It covers Kustomize, which transforms manifests per environment without templates. From the core fields of kustomization.yaml to the base/overlays structure, patchesStrategicMerge and JSON6902 patches, the hash-based rolling of configMapGenerator and secretGenerator, and the build-and-apply flow via the -k flag — organized from a hands-on exam perspective.
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) #8: kernel hardening, capabilities, /proc protection
The eighth post of the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) series. We cover how to strip privileges from containers with securityContext to shrink the attack surface. From the drop-ALL-then-add-only-what-you-need pattern for Linux capabilities, to the dangers of privileged and allowPrivilegeEscalation, runAsNonRoot and readOnlyRootFilesystem, /proc masking via procMount, and blocking hostPID/hostNetwork/hostIPC and host path mounts — all pulled together into a hardened YAML example.
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) #7: Jinja2 Templates — Filters, Control Flow, and lookup
The seventh post in the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) series. We render .j2 files into per-host configuration with the template module, cover Jinja2 syntax for variable output, for, and if, plus filters like default, upper, join, and to_nice_yaml, read files and environment variables with lookup, and even handle whitespace control — all in the form the exam asks for.
Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) #4: Boot and the system — systemd, target, GRUB2, password recovery
The fourth post in the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) series. We work through the structure of systemd and how to control services with systemctl, switching the boot target, editing kernel parameters in GRUB2, and the single most frequent RHCSA task — root password recovery with rd.break — by typing the commands ourselves.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #5 Domain 1-4 Development with AWS Services — Messaging and Events
The fourth post of the DVA-C02 development domain. It covers the difference between SQS standard queues and FIFO queues, visibility timeout and long polling, DLQs, SNS pub/sub and fan-out (SNS + SQS), EventBridge's event bus and rule-based routing and schedules, and Step Functions' state machines (Standard vs Express), all at the exam level. Knowing when to choose which messaging service is the core.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) #16 Full-Scale Multiple-Choice Practice Exam — 50 Questions + Explanations
The final post of the SAA-C03 series. Matched to the real exam's domain weights (security 30% , resilience 26% , high performance 24% , cost 20%), you solve 50 questions and find your weak domains through each question's answer and explanation. Solve them on the clock, then go back to the relevant domain post to shore up any gaps.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) #14 Scheduling 2: Taints/tolerations, Priority/PriorityClass, preemption
The fourteenth post in the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) series. We work through taints that let a node push Pods away and tolerations that accept that rejection (the NoSchedule/PreferNoSchedule/NoExecute effects, tolerationSeconds), the default taint on control plane nodes, and finally PriorityClass for ranking priority and preemption that evicts lower-priority Pods when resources run short — all from an operator's point of view with YAML and kubectl.
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) #9 Helm: install, upgrade, rollback, values
The ninth post in the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) series. We organize Helm's chart structure and the release concept that lets you treat a bundle of manifests as a single package, then drill helm repo,install,upgrade,rollback and values overrides hands-on, command by command. We type through the full flow of previewing results with dry-run and reverting with history.