Greetings All -    Thank you for your patience, your interest in Cloudera, and the time you've spent preparing to attempt the certification exams.  We understand this is time which could be focused on other endeavors.     Cloudera acknowledges the frustrations and challenges individuals have faced over the last few months in scheduling and taking certification exams.  As the lead for our training endeavors, I'm personally sorry for inconvenience our certification has caused the community, our customers, and our partners.     Over the past few weeks, we believe to have identified and fixed the critical problems with our infrastructure.  This claim is based on the successful launch and grading of over 100 certifications in the past week.  We are confident this level of reliability will continue.   If you were impacted by a canceled exam, or showed up for an exam that didn't launch, the certification team will be contacting you directly.  We are resetting eligibility, and you should be able to schedule at your convenience.  Please contact certification@cloudera.com with any questions regarding rescheduling.   Our long-term goal remains providing the consistent level of service and reliability that our customers and partners require when investing in the program.  As such, we are porting our exams to a new infrastructure to alleviate the potential for these types of issues.  We expect this project to be completed later this year.     This change will improve reliability and scalabilty; ensuring we deliver the best-in-class certification experience we envision for our customers and partners.       Thank you again for your continued support of Cloudera, and your interest in our training and certification services.     Best Regards,   Mark Morrissey Senior Director, Cloudera Training & Certification ... View more

(Disclosure:  I'm Cloudera's Director for Educational Programs, and manage the relationship with Exit Certified... so please feel free to solicit more input from others who've taken Exit MVP courses)   Exit Certified uses the identical materials/content/labs/exercises as Cloudera when delivering training classes.  Their instructors go through the same certification/authorization process as a Cloudera direct instructor, and to date we've been very pleased with the post class evaluation scores from Exit.  The MVP and iMVP modalities of delivery are somewhat unique for virtual classes, as each student is able to interact with the instructor through the use of two way cameras.     Years ago there seemed to be a stigma about attending a class virtually, and t here are individuals who don't feel that you can't come close to replicating the "in-class" experience virtually.  It's an individual's preference, and they may weight the in-person collaboration with instructor and fellow students as paramount to the success of the class.     But, with the vastly enhanced technology utilized for virtual delivery today, it has became a very popular and viable option.  Most IT vendors offer a robust schedule of virtual options to appease customers.     Exit has invested resources and time to ensure their offering is a best-of-breed solution for virtual trainng.  That being the case, I can confidently recommend an MVP or iMVP course - the content, instructor quality, and learning objectives are identical to taking a class through Cloudera, and the delivery modality is top quality for virtual learning.     mark   ... View more