Red Hat Certified Specialist in Service Mesh for Resilient Microservices Exam (EX328)

Study points for the exam

As part of this exam, you should be able to perform these tasks:

• Understand and work with Red Hat Openshift Service Mesh Custom Resources
• Deploy and configure applications on Service Mesh:
  • Install sidecar manually in pod applications
  • Automatic sidecar injection using annotations
  • Understand the configuration of network policies (Mesh members, external services, etc.)
• Work with request routing and traffic management.
  • Be able to configure static and dynamic request routing to different versions of an application
• Understand the deployment/release pattern strategies that Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh® can help with, providing more complex operational functionality, including A/B testing and canary releases
• Configure and manage advanced routing techniques to control the flow and API calls between services
  • Traffic shifting migration within the mesh producing between different services A/B testing, canary rollouts, and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits, and dark launches for a selective group of users
  • Take profit of the traffic mirroring capabilities to bring changes to the microservices. Be able to produce shadowing launches copying the live traffic
• Send the inbound and outbound traffic from and to the mesh, managing the ingress and egress traffic control policies
  • Define and control gateway entry points into the mess for the incoming traffic allowing pass requests through the services
  • Enable controlled access to external publicly accessible services from within the istio cluster
• Be able to configure the network resilience and the fault tolerance dynamically at runtime to ensure the failing nodes and prevent localized failures from cascading
  • Control the waiting time for replies defining timeouts
  • Enhance service availability specifying the number of request attempts with retry strategies
  • Limit for calls within a service and prevent access to an overloaded or failing host applying a circuit breaker mechanism
  • Specify the connection and ejection pool policies configuring the load balancing destination rules
• Work and configure Service Mesh policy checks
  • Define enforcement features through policies, configure local and global rate limiting, and define access quotas
  • Enable and configure the authorization for denial and allow policies applied to a workload
• Understand and configure the workload-to-workload communication using the implemented architecture for authentication and authorization security in Service Mesh
  • Provide service-to-service communication with secure naming authorization
  • Tunnel the service-to-service communication using mutual TLS communication.
  • Map the identity of the service name with secure naming
  • Define peer authentication policies to enforce the mutual TLS mode
  • Define the required end-user authentication policy check. Define and configure access authorization rules for service and end-user to workload communications
• Understand and work with the fault injection mechanisms to introduce errors and chaos testing into the system to test the failure recovery capacity of the applications
  • Inject timing failures producing delays to mimic increased network latency or overloaded services
  • Produce crash failures with error response injections and TCP connection failures

Exam format

This exam is a hands-on, practical exam that requires you to undertake real-world development tasks. Internet access is not provided during the exam, and you will not be permitted to bring any hard copy or electronic documentation into the exam. This prohibition includes notes, books, or any other material. MicroProfile specification and related documentation is available during the exam.

Scores and reporting

Official scores for exams come exclusively from Red Hat Certification Central. Red Hat does not authorize examiners or training partners to report results to candidates directly. Scores on the exam are usually reported within 3 U.S. business days.

Exam results are reported as total scores. Red Hat does not report performance on individual items, nor will it provide additional information upon request.

You are eligible for one exam retake if you are unsuccessful on your first attempt.