Sep 1, 2021
Piece of Insight for Cloudera Certified Associate — Spark & Hadoop Developer (CCA175) Certification Aspirants
Believe me it’s not that much hard as what it was projected. So, anyone who can put some reasonable effort can clear the certification.
So here i listed down the questions which i had in my mind from started preparing for the certification to till i sit down for the 2-hour remote proctor exam. And i tried to answer the questions based upon my experience.
Are any online courses out there which will help us to prepare for the certification?
yes, we do have. I came to know from my LinkedIn connections who already cleared the certification and mentored me for the same. We can split the preparation into two modes.
First if you are beginner or new to Spark, then to get familiarize yourself with the certification topics on spark you can go through any one of below courses based up on your preferences to either Python or Scala.
If you are not the beginner, you already have some exposure and experience in spark, then you can directly go to below two courses by Mathew Barr to practice for the certification with real exam scenario
- CCA175 Exam Prep Qs pt A (With Spark 2.4 Hadoop Cluster)
- CCA175 Exam Prep Qs pt B (With Spark 2.4 Hadoop Cluster)
Each of the above courses have 30 practice question with solution. And the course provides you the virtual Hadoop cluster with spark installed so that you can solve the question by yourself either using spark-shell or pyspark. This is very much like real exam where you will be provided with CDH cluster.
Part A course mainly have practice questions on read and storing the different file formats from/to HDFS with different available compressions. Part B course mainly have practice questions on data transformations.
Go through the practice questions again and again until you can resolve at least 8 questions in an hour. Because in real exam you are expected to resolve 9–12 problems in 120 minutes. So, prepare and plan yourself to complete the 9–12 problems in 90–100 minutes and have the last 20–30 minutes to review the outputs generated are in correct format, correct compression, correct output location and did we apply the expected transformation correctly, etc.
People who do not settle with above practice questions and need some more practice exam can go for below course from Navdeep Kaur
This course guide you to setup Spark/Hadoop Cluster on google cloud for free and set up data related to practice tests. But i prefer to set up data on Matthew Barr provided cluster and work out then practice tests. It will help you to save some time and totally bail you out from scenarios like debugging Hadoop cluster in google cloud which is not at all in scope for the certification.
Do we have any discount in the certification fees?
Yes, we do have. Cloudera provides 20% discount for its certification until 30th September 2021. We can avail this discount using the coupon code “ClouderaCert_20" which will reduce the certification cost from $295 to $236. Once we purchased the certificate, we must schedule the exam within 74 days from the date of purchase. So, we can very well purchase now and clear the certification within those 74 days.
How the remote cluster going to be in the real exam and will my laptop support to take the exam?
- The remote cluster going to be slow, and you should be prepared for the same. Even though spark and CDH documentations are available as bookmarks in the Mozila Firefox browser, you cannot rely on them. So, prepare yourself to not rely on the documentation during the exam because of time restriction.
- Once the proctor released the exam to you, by default the Mozila Firefox browser opened with the exam questions with detailed instruction. You should open the number of terminals you need and start resolving the questions.
- Since you going to access the remote cluster in your browser only, the fonts size going to be small especially in the terminal window. So, it’s advisable to have external monitor while taking the exam for whom not comfortable with the small font size. You can also increase the resolution based on the instruction they provided in the Mozila Firefox browser which have the questions.
- If you are curious about whether my laptop or desktop compatible enough to take the exam, Cloudera exam portal have an option called “Compatibility Check” which you validate by yourself before your exam.
- It’s advisable to have minimum 5 Mbps upload and download speed for the exam.
Latest Update
From today (September 1, 2021) onwards, Cloudera started realigning its certification towards their CDP products instead of CDH and HDP. So, All the CCA and CCP exams will only be available to purchase until September 15, 2021 and must be scheduled and completed by October 31, 2021.
