Introducing Technical Certifications at MinIO

We are excited to announce our first technical certification, the MinIO Certified Administrator - Practitioner. The MinIO certified professional program is designed to validate an individual's practical skills administrating MinIO. For the practitioner level exam, candidates will need working knowledge of all core features and capabilities including deployment, bucket creation, versioning, life cycle management, replication, encryption, and authentication, among others. Candidates who earn this certification will have demonstrated production MinIO administration skills.

Having a certified professional program makes sense for us at this point. MinIO has become the most widely adopted object store on the planet and there are tens of thousands of MinIO developers. Core to this phenomenon is the fact that it is so easy to use. With a small 100 MB binary, the ability to run on any platform, developer friendly SDKs, and both a GUI and Linux-like command line options, it’s easy to get started with MinIO. The simplicity of MinIO belies its power to manage Exabyte scale mission critical data infrastructure. Nonetheless, to take full advantage of MinIO’s capabilities to maximize performance, ensure data availability and security at enterprise scale you need a deeper understanding of the product. The MinIO Certification provides individuals with an important professional certification and provides leaders with confidence their team has the requisite knowledge and skills to successfully deploy and manage MinIO in production. A MinIO trained and certified team will be more efficient and maximize system performance, both of which reduce cost while also avoiding outages and security breaches that can have devastating effects on an enterprise. 

MinIO is a core building block underlying artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads, modern data lakes, and cloud native computing architectures and having this certifications will underscore the holders real world knowledge in these areas. The MinIO exam focuses on practical, applied use of MinIO and will validate job role competency to current and future employers. 

The exam covers 13 core MinIO administration topics. 

• Configure and Deploy
• Encryption
• Erasure Code
• Events
• Lifecycle Management
• Manage Deployments
• MinIO Client
• Monitoring
• Recover after Failure
• Replication
• Retention
• Security
• Versioning

For each topic, the MinIO Certification web page provides additional details for each skill. For example, versioning includes the following specific tasks: 

• Enable versioning on a bucket
• Create a delete marker
• Suspend versioning on a bucket
• Delete specific object versions

Below is an example of a question you might find on the exam. 

When setting up site replication, which flag can be used to replicate ILM expiration rules?

A. --replicate-ilm-expiry

B. --replicate-ilm

C. --enable-ilm-expiry-replication

D. --enable-ilm-expiry

The correct answer is A

Candidates are strongly encouraged to prepare for this exam using MinIO’s extensive YouTube library that includes self-directed hands-on labs, MinIO documentation, and most importantly, through hands-on experience. 

Exam Details

The exam presents 60 knowledge based questions over a 90 minute time period, and is remotely proctored through video through our partner Prometric. It can be taken anywhere that meets the system, network, and camera requirements. During the exam, you will not have access to external materials such as notes or MinIO docs. To register for the exam, go to MinIO Certification and then click on the “Sign up now” button on the page. Make sure to also check out the additional details found in the Certification FAQ.

Summary 

This is the first MinIO certification exam. We will bring out additional ones over time. Nonetheless, we are excited for professionals to earn this certification and have some swag for those that successfully pass the test - both digital and physical.  

So hit the books or use your existing deployments to hone your expertise because there are plenty of companies building entire teams around MinIO.