Free and Fast Ways to Pick Up OpenStack Savvy
It's hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story is only a few years old. 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 it even has its own foundation.
But many organizations are struggling with launching and maintaining OpenStack deployments. In fact, hardly any skillset is more valued than OpenStack skills in this job market. If you're looking for free resources and tutorials for mastering OpenStack, this post has our latest, updated guides.
First, you may 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. As the site notes: "Rackspace, one of the original founders of the OpenStack project along with NASA, published this video that gives quick primer on OpenStack, what it is and who uses it. This 6-minute video, which is part of an ongoing series on OpenStack, introduces the cloud OS and dives into it from a high level to give you the basic understanding of this disruptive technology."
Among other OpenStack-focused videos and posts worth taking a look at, Data Center Knowledge offers:
Closer Look: Piston Cloud Computing
Closer Look: OpenStack OS for Clouds
Video: Demo of PentOS Open Stack Cloud
For even more, look into the video archive, and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.
We have also covered The OpenStack Foundation's launch of a Training Marketplace designed to make it easier to discover training courses offered by providers in the OpenStack community. And, the foundation has made available a series of free, online training guides for OpenStack, which you can find here. There are training guides for OpenStack Associates, Operators, Developers and Architects.
In addition, here on OStatic, we've collected much of our own OpenStack and cloud computing coverage, including many interviews, in this post.
And, Opensource.com has some excellent coverage of OpenStack tutorials, found here and here. As the site notes:
Just getting started with exploring OpenStack, and want to make a go at installing it locally? Here's a quick guide to setting up Devstack in a virtual machine, along with getting the Horizon dashboard working so that you can have a visual interface with your test cloud.
Ready to take the next step and install OpenStack in a server environment? Here's how to deploy the RDO distribution of OpenStack onto a single server using Ansible.
Once you're running applications in your OpenStack cloud, you need some way to keep track of performance and any issues that pop up on each server. David Wahlstrom takes a look at 6 easy-to-use tools for monitoring applications on your virtual servers.
Also, keep an eye on our regular roundups of OpenStack certification and training programs. Mirantis claims that its training is vendor-agnostic, and the company teaches OpenStack across the most popular distributions, hypervisors, storage backends, and network topologies. The company offers OpenStack Fundamentals (OS50), a one-day course for business professionals, OpenStack Bootcamp I (OS100), training IT professionals to operate, configure, and administer an OpenStack environment, and OpenStack Bootcamp II (OS200), which is training on the manual deployment of OpenStack. Earlier this year, Mirantis launched Virtual Training, a synchronized, instructor-led online OpenStack professional training option.
Meanwhile, as part of its efforts to grow the OpenStack talent pool and global community, the OpenStack Foundation has announced a new professional certification program that is meant to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge and be accessible to OpenStack professionals around the world.
The Certified OpenStack Administrator is a professional typically with at least six months OpenStack experience and has the skills required to provide day-to-day operation and management of an OpenStack cloud, according to the Foundation. There is more at the website: http://openstack.org/coa
Finally, it is worth remembering that the official documentation for OpenStack is a valuable resource, too.
OStatic will continue to update coverage of free online training resources for OpenStack, and also look into our coverage of OpenStack training and certification coursework and classes.