Linux Foundation Certified Cloud Technician (LFCT) exam study guide

Published in

ITNEXT

4 min readFeb 17, 2023

Introduction

Recently, I passed the Linux Foundation Cloud Technician exam. I want to share my experiences with the exam, preparation tips and tricks, and useful resources.

The Linux Foundation introduced the LFCT certification in November 2022 describing it as:

The Linux Foundation Certified Cloud Technician (LFCT) exam demonstrates a candidate’s competence of using the command line to configure, manage, and troubleshoot Linux systems and containers in a platform- and distribution-agnostic way

More details about certification and exam available on Linux Foundation website.

Exam

The exam is hands-on and, similar to Kubernetes exams, test not only theoretical know-how, but also practical skills. Exam highlights:

Exam can be taken remotely
120 minutes to go through 20 tasks and questions
Almost all tasks are practical, just a handful of multiple choice questions
Exam VMs run distro-agnostic Alpine based Linux with most of the GNU core utils installed
Vim/Nano editors are available
Man pages are available
Chrome browser recommended for the exam
Passing score is minimum 64
12 months to schedule and take the exam from the purchase date
One free retake
Certification valid for 3 years

Topics and exam flow

Topic % of exam questions

Essential Commands 20%
System Configuration 15%
Troubleshooting 20%
Virtualization and Containers 20%
GitOps Basics 25%

The exam is heavy on Linux questions, and going through the Linux tools and command line utilities course is very helpful. Working with archives, using regex, grep, creating and mounting file systems, permissions, ownership, all this is important to know very well in a practical application.

Familiarity with git is also critical, but nothing too advanced. Definitely refresh on ip related config and cloud-init in detail.

Useful learning resources

The resources listed below are available for free. Linux Foundation has a lot of free courses.

Here are some that are useful for the exam:

Another useful training in Pawel’s final test on his killercoda Linux scenarios. What makes in good is not only excellent content but also the fact that the test is practical which is what real exam is about.

Tips & Tricks

Practice with Linux VM is essential. If you don’t want to install a Linux VM, use interactive killercoda linux environment.

You can also use some predefined scenarios, such as exquisite scenarios by Pawel Piwosz.

Commands help

It is often easier to use the --help flag of a command rather than going through man pages.

Grep in help output

When using the --help parameter, it is not possible to grep on the result. Instead, use the built-in pager search functionality. For example:

ls --help | less and press / to get into search mode.

Check what commands are available

If you get stuck and don’t know what commands are available, for example for creating block devices, check the /sbin and /bin directories content.

Using man pages

Man pages are available in the exam environment. Learn how to use them effectively alongside command builtin help. Each man page belongs to one of the below sections.

A section is a number in brackets with the man page name.

✔ section 1: Shell commands and applications
✔ section 4: Network services — if TCP/IP or NFS is installed Device drivers and network protocols
✔ section 5: Standard file formats — for example: shows what a tar archive looks like.
✔ section 6: Games
✔ section 7: Miscellaneous files and documents
✔ section 8: System administration and maintenance commands
✔ section 9: Obscure kernel specs and interfaces

The format in general for pages in man is:

Letters in bold are to be written exactly as they are. Words in between [] are options, that is, they can be sent as arguments to the command. Letters in italic are to be substituted with your arguments.

To identify what man pages sections the command belongs to, use whatis command. For example whatis passwd to identify what sections a given command is part of.

Getting man help is easy: man man

It’s possible to use /search and n/N to navigate the search results. Search also supports regex so /^(\s*\-v) would search for lines starting from -h

If you know that the command is in multiple sections (like passwd for example) you can.

man passwd.5

Search for man pages with certain keyword, for example man -k directory would show all the man pages that have a directory word in them. This can be extended with grep and focus search on specific actions. man -k directory | grep -i crate.

Conclusion

The tricky part of this exam is that it covers a lot of ground and requires a broad knowledge of various topics. Focusing on getting better with Linux administration and various GNU core utils usage as well as git and cloud-init is essential.

Good luck with the exam and if you have any questions feel free to comment here or reach out on mastodon under https://fosstodon.org/@piotr1215.