Hi everyone,
Talking about my experiences, I can't say that they were good.
I've attempted twice the Spark certification exam and both times were infuriating.
My first go at it, was not even my first. Basically, just at the beginning of it the Live Monitor mentioned that there was a severe server disruption, that I had been going on like that for the whole day and that I probably couldn't take my test that day. Which was the case. After that I've contacted hortonworks which happily gave me credits to attempt the exam once again.
The second time was yesterday and again, not a pleasant experience. This time I could access to the machine I was going to do the exam over. So far, so good. Went through the exercises and started hdfs to check the files that I was going to be working with. Too bad, HDFS was not working at all. Couldn't do much with spark-shell either. One is supposed to have access to a node through ssh but that didn't work at all. There is another script which goes by the name start-all-services.sh, or something similar, which is supposed to help you if there is any issues with your machine. Nope, not really. As part of the exam instructions, they encourage you to speak with your proctor if you face any issues but all that he/she could do is send a report to hortonworks about that.
Having said all that, I still tried to complete the exam which means you need to fill these seven text files with something you hope is going to have no typos and has the correct assumptions about the files provided (like "I hope this csv does have headers")
Other than that, the exercises are quite straightforward and you got plenty of time to complete the test.
