Will the sub-version of CDH 5 change from 5.3.2 to the latest available?

[#1]

For CCA-175, the page says that CDH 5 (at this time 5.3.2) cluster would be provided. Is it possible that when I take exam and a newer version of the CDH is available (say 5.5.0) then that would be provided to me?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

The cluster will use a "recent" version of CDH.  Currently that is 5.3.2.  In the future, the answer is yes; the cluster will be upgraded to a newer version of CDH.  I would not expect an immediate change when Cloudera releases new versions of CDH, as there will need to be a period of testing the exam on the newer versions.

In general, however, you should not care what version you are using.  As this is a developer exam, there will likely be no change to the solution you provide regardless of the underlying system.  Creating a table in Impala is probably not going to change based on the cluster.  I understand there may be some effects for major changes, such as CDH 5.5.0 and the addition of tools such as Spark SQL, but changes like that will be announced on the Cloudera certification webpages.

[#3]

Can you tell if CDH version for tests would be upgraded around April or not? Because CDH 5.5 comes with Spark 1.6 which has support for Spark Datasets; so if I have CDH 5.5 or (CDH 5.4) at my disposal then I can utilize Spark Datasets for my solutions.

[#4]

You can expect that major changes to CDH will also change the version that is on the clusters.  There is not a schedule for when changes will be applied.

I would watch the Cloudera certifcation webpages for updates.  http://www.cloudera.com/content/www/en-us/training/certification/cca-spark.html