RHEL8 RHCE What’s new?

There is a good reason why this exam gets a new name, EX294 instead of EX300: it’s a completely new exam.

The RHCE v7 exam was all about mastering service configuration: Postfix, Kerberos, Apache, iSCSI, Samba, MariaDB, Firewalld rich rules to name a few. You had to configure all these complicated services in a very quick way, memorising each step done multiple times in a lab.

It was a performance mixing time management and technical virtuosity.

With RHCE v8, Red Hat has decided that an advanced engineer was an expert in Ansible automation. This is a complete change of direction.

Why Red Hat kept the same exam name is a mystery. Why the Ansible CoE (Certificate of Expertise) (EX407) wasn’t judged enough to supplement the RHCE v7 exam remains a question.

There is a FAQ available to Understand the what, why, and when of Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) changes.

It is very likely that the RHCE exam will progressively lose some part of its prestige, the new edition being seen as RHCSA + Ansible.

Also, according to the new Red Hat‘s release cadence, a minor version of RHEL every six months and a major version of RHEL every three years, it is interesting to note that the duration of the RHCE certification is now synchronized with the RHEL release cycle.