Red Hat Certified Developer in Cloud-native Applications (EX188)

Teams moving applications into containers often hit the same friction: images built inconsistently, containers that fail without obvious errors, and handoffs between development and operations that slow delivery. This course gives IT Directors and Team Leads a structured way to standardize Podman skills across both groups.

Role fit: Built for developers and systems administrators with 1–2 years of Linux experience who are comfortable with the terminal, common commands, and basic shell scripting. Teams newer to Linux may benefit from completing RHCSA (EX200) training first.

Time investment: About 6.3 hours across 8 skills. The course can be assigned in weekly learning blocks without pulling practitioners off production work.

Risk and change management: The training covers container fundamentals, Red Hat Enterprise Linux lab setup, image management, registry configuration, and hands-on troubleshooting tasks. These are the areas where inconsistent build and run practices can create operational risk. For teams standardized on Docker, the course builds Podman skills in a Red Hat environment so developers and systems administrators can share a common container workflow.

How CBT Nuggets supports the outcome: Practitioners set up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux lab environment and work through hands-on validation challenges. A dedicated EX188 exam-prep skill walks through exam-style tasks. Team Reporting lets leaders track progress toward certification readiness.

IT teams use this training to move applications off heavyweight, full-OS deployments and onto lightweight Podman containers that bundle only the application, its configuration, and its dependencies. The course works through practical Red Hat-focused container tasks, including setting up RHEL and Rocky Linux lab environments, pulling approved container images, inspecting stopped containers, building custom images, configuring persistent storage, and managing container permissions.

• Faster troubleshooting, fewer escalations: Team members use podman ps -a, log inspection, and podman exec sessions to find why a container failed. They don't have to rebuild it blindly.
• Repeatable, consistent builds: Practitioners write custom images using Containerfile instructions such as FROM, RUN, ADD, and COPY. They also run a private local registry, so every environment pulls the same approved images.
• Reliable data and safer permissions: Teams set up persistent storage for containers that would otherwise lose their data. They also learn how container process UIDs map to the host, which reduces data loss and over-privileged workloads.
• Less friction between development and operations: Shared container images, Containerfiles, and container networking patterns give developers and system administrators a common definition for how applications run.

For IT Directors, the result is a team that can build, run, and support containerized workloads in-house, with an EX188 certification path to validate that capability.

Knowledge

• Why teams package an application with its files, configurations, and dependencies in a container instead of standing up a full operating system for each workload
• How container images differ from running container instances, and how Podman compares to Docker
• How namespaces isolate containers, and how process UIDs affect container permissions
• Why containers are ephemeral, and how persistent storage keeps data beyond a container's lifecycle
• How Podman supports container workflows as teams prepare applications for larger-scale deployment patterns
• How microservices split application functions, such as authentication and product search, into separate services

Ability

• Pull images from registries, then start, stop, and map ports for containers with Podman
• Run commands inside running containers with podman exec, including interactive TTY shell sessions
• Build custom images with instructions such as FROM, RUN, ADD, and COPY, and limit container resources with Podman
• Run and configure a private local registry, and set up persistent storage and user permissions
• Check container status with podman ps -a when containers fail or exit unexpectedly, and configure containers to start automatically
• Define multi-container applications in shareable Podman Compose files, pin image versions, and practice EX188-style tasks