It's a question of prioritization. Our aim is to focus on the skills and knowledge that are the most useful for the most people and oranizations. The structure of the certification program should reflect that. More knowledge is always a good thing but it's a bottomless well. What should skills and knowledge should people have first and foremost? When people certify with us and when organizations use Red Hat certification for management decisions, they are looking to and relying upon us for guidance on that question.
Automation is emerging as an essential skill. The escalating importance of automation is being driven by scale. Scale is in turn being driven by a planet full of people carrying smartphones, IoT, digital transformation in every industry, the growing ubiquity of data science methods and practices, the demands of AI and more. I suspect that it won't be long before industry will need fewer people who just know the right commands to type and more people who know how to automate processes.
Having a planet of people banging out one-off shell scripts will likewise not be enough. A cross-functional automation strategy and an automation framework that can work within such a strategy will also be increasingly necessary. The demands of scale are driving new deployment paradigms that mean server, DBA and network teams can't each approach automation atomically. Enter Ansible.
Our conviction that automation has surged in importance does not mean that the topics we have been testing and validating for RHCE are unimportant. They remain important. It comes back to what I mentioned above. We have a responsibility to curate and prioritize. Our existing RHCE exam and the System Admninistration III course will not be orphans.. They will find homes in new and existing offerings because they remain useful and relevant.
