For a Job or a Deployment, Get Essential OpenStack Skills Here
If you review its evolution, it's hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story is only about five years old yet. Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create a sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Since then, OpenStack has won over countless tech titans that are backing it, and has its own foundation.
But many organizations are struggling with launching and maintaining OpenStack deployments. If you're looking for free resources and tutorials for mastering OpenStack, this newly updated post will provide many good choices.
"OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline," Josh McKenty, who helped develop the platform, has told CRN, adding, "to be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware." The good news is that there are more ways to sharpen OpenStack skills, and gain valuable certification.
The OpenStack Foundation launched a Training Marketplace designed to make it easier to discover training courses offered by providers in the OpenStack community. “The goal of the Foundation is to eliminate barriers to OpenStack adoption, create more OpenStack experts and ensure that OpenStack has a positive impact on the careers of our community members,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, in a statement. “We want to grow the community, accelerate the availability of training programs worldwide and help close the OpenStack job gap."
The Linux Foundation, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Piston, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and SwiftStack are just some of the companies to have courses available in the OpenStack Foundation Training Marketplace.
Mirantis has steadily announced interesting training programs. The company has also announced that hundreds of organizations around the world have turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on multiple platforms.
Meanwhile, Rackspace has an entire curriculum of courses built around OpenStack. The company has been conducting on-demand e-learning training courses and offers a number of new classroom courses.
Silicon Angle has produced an extremely exhaustive roundup of online and offline resources for learning OpenStack skills. It includes discussion of OpenStack bootcamps from MorphLabs and Mirantis, Red Hat OpenStack training, Piston training, and more.
The OpenStack Foundation has put some numbers on the expected growth for OpenStack-related jobs and added more about its Training Marketplace:
"OpenStack expertise continues to pay off, with OpenStack jobs consistently paying higher wages and employers doubling the number of job postings over the past year. The ecosystem has quickly responded to help developers and operators gain these valuable skills....Future demand for OpenStack skills is only expected to grow, with the BSA Global Cloud Scorecard predicting that 14 million cloud jobs will be created by 2015."
You may also want to take a look at what the Data Center Knowledge site offers. It has surprisingly easy to follow and rich video demos and explanations of the OpenStack platform. If you're totally new to the OpenStack cloud platform, look into Data Center Knowledge's OpenStack 101 video, which comes originally from Rackspace and NASA.
And, don't forget that you can obtain valuable certification for OpenStack skills from some of the organizations mentioned in this post. Red Hat, for example, has announced its Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology. You can find out more about it in this post.