Juniper EOL and Updates.
Looking at Juniper’s Certification and Training news there are several updates I think are worth discussing.
In March, Juniper announced the JNCIE-Cloud and JNCIP-Cloud certifications will go End of Life on 30th June 2023.
That’s right. Not EOL for the exam, with a new version coming, but EOL for the certifications entirely. The JNCIA- and JNCIS-Cloud remain at this stage.
While I don’t know why, I can only speculate that the demand wasn’t there for the -Cloud certifications. Based on the research I did for the number of JNCIEs the -Cloud certs didn’t seem to have much popularity.
I still think the -Cloud track was an odd choice. Juniper certs are already a bit of a niche topic, and the -Cloud track felt like it was a niche within a niche. It seemed to require learning a bunch of virtualization topics within VMWare, Kubernetes, and OpenStack and how to integrate Contrail with this. Perhaps these topics didn’t resonate well with the people most likely to do Juniper certs.
From a network engineer perspective, I want to spend my study and training time working towards certs that are relevant to me and my career goals, and the -Cloud track never felt relevant enough – how often am I likely to work on a Contrail deployment?
From a vendor perspective, certification tracks are a lot of work. They need to be reviewed, updated, and relevant. Training material needs to be produced and kept current. Exam security needs to be monitored. If there aren’t enough candidates, then that time could be better spent on other tracks.
In November 2022 Juniper also announced the EOL for the Design Specialist certifications and the renaming of JNCDA to JNCIA-Design. The EOL date of 17th January 2023 has already passed.
The demise of the design certs feels a bit like the old JNCSP Support Professional tracks back in the early to mid-2010s. I can only assume there weren’t enough candidates to make retaining the design certs worthwhile.
Fortinet
I started to look into the Fortinet certifications recently, and there is a major update happening on 1st October 2023. You can read more about it here https://www.fortinet.com/nse-training/training-program-update. The short version is that the NSE designations will be going away, and replaced with a range of Fortinet Certified certs, with multiple options or specializations at the more advanced levels of the new certs.
It appears that if you have current existing Fortinet certifications, then these will meet the requirements for some of the new badges. Again, have a look at the link above for more detail.
For example, the Fortinet Certified Professional – Network Security requires the NSE 4 FortiOS and one of several NSE 5 or NSE 6 exams. As I read it, if you have both NSE 4 FortiOS and NSE 5 FortiManager by 1st October 2023, then you would get the FCP – Network Security badge.
If you are currently studying towards Fortinet certifications, I recommend reviewing the information available and working out how this might impact your study plans.
Cisco
Cisco is now producing a road map of how they are updating their certifications.
The intent is for more frequent, smaller updates to the certs, to keep them relevant, rather than having a major update every three to four years.
I like this approach. Hopefully, it will give candidates more certainty about when exams are changing, and what the difference is between the versions. Unfortunately, it also seems to have created some confusion. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next couple of years.
David Bombal has an interview with Yusuf Bhaiji covering the road map idea and what it means in more detail https://youtu.be/GytL-dmlSD8.