Ask Experienced Devs

I'm not familiar with that certification, but looking at it, as you say the knowledge gained from it would be tremendously useful.

If you are looking to get into DevOps, I'd probably suggest you do some of the cloud certifications instead (AWS, Azure, GCP). Those will cover everything, from networking to infrastructure to app development on cloud platforms.

The CCNA cert itself would probably be more useful if you want to be a network engineer in a data center. But I would definitely recommend you keep doing the course, if not the exam.

A lot of people I work with don't have low level networking skills, so if you can develop those alongside your appdev skills it would set you apart.

A final word about certifications. When I interview people, I will notice if they have certifications but I don't put much stock in them. I've worked with too many people that have them and are still useless. If you do them, make sure you spend the time to actually learn and understand the material rather than just doing enough to pass the exams, because that's where the real value is.

In my opinion, no it's not worth it. A CCNA and the related family of Cisco certifications really trains you to be a network engineer or work in ops in general. The certificate is not very valuable for a dev or devops role in general. The material itself goes over topics that are less valuable like spanning tree protocol. And it doesn't much if anything beyond layer 4. DNS, load balancing, web protocols (HTTP, etc) are all more valuable topics to learn.

Now, the material that you're learning isn't wasteful, necessarily, but devops positions are not generally configuring routers and switches day-to-day, so I don't view this as something valuable for software engineers even in devops roles.

Some of the topics that I find valuable - general TCP/IP in general and some of the routing protocols (namely BGP is the big one) - but the other stuff just requires passing knowledge that it exists and not much else. I would pick up a networking book and go over the topics in there instead of configuring switches and vlans.

You already have some experience, so I’d suggest working with your employer to pay for the certification and classes rather than going out of pocket.

Either they will pay and you’re happy, or they’ll tell you it isn’t valuable for your role and that also gives you valuable information