My rhcsa expired and I only have experience beyond that. Your task right now is to find a job and the easiest way to do that is to leverage your network. If you don’t have a network, you need to prove that you can commit to a long term plan and learn a skill. Most people do that with degrees. Unfortunately a lot of people have degrees and technology is getting more competitive. That’s where you see school competitions and certifications. If you don’t want to do that, you’ll need to be able to speak competently to the role.

Unfortunately right now I do not recommend platform/devops/sre for anyone breaking into the field. If I create an application today, it’s server less or bring your own dockerfile on a provided machine image. So what are you administrating? Legacy shops will be around for decades, but the future here is layered architecture not os tasks.

Depends on your end goal, don’t pay for yourself. Tech is hard to break into, certificates can help elevate your resume when you do not have a network to leverage. It’s often good to “top off” your resume when market trends shift and you are lacking experience. For instance right now AWS certificates are likely strong additions if you don’t have any cloud background. My rhcsa helped get my first job and is a positive for legacy LAMP and java shops. Trending forward: you will primarily be using it to support Linux based docker containers and a lot of the networking and hardware configuration will be obfuscated away. There is a non-zero amount of file ownership and user groups; but existing organizations will have figured that out already.

Microsoft has been building the O365 platform to lock out competitors and locking users into an ecosystem that is difficult to leave. They systematically eliminate competition and have pushed to create laws that make competition harder. In embrace extend extinguish, they are in phase 3, which is a massive red flag. They also started putting out spyware and malware into their software and have proven they can’t maintain security; making them a bad actor in a position of power. Scale is debatable, but Microsoft is undeniably evil in 2024.