Mirantis Takes Platform-Agnostic Approach to OpenStack Certification
OpenStack, the red hot open source cloud platform, is also emerging as a generator of a lot of top tech jobs, and, as we've reported, open source skills in general are highly valued in the current job market. In answer to the demand for OpenStack skills, several companies have introduced certification programs. Red Hat has launched its IaaS OpenStack Certification program, and Rackspace has announced many training offerings. Meanwhile, ptira, hastexo, The Linux Foundation, Mirantis, Morphlabs, Piston, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and SwiftStack are the first companies to have courses available in the new OpenStack Foundation Training Marketplace.
Mirantis, though, is taking an interesting approach to an OpenStack certification program, delivering what it bills as "a vender agnostic skillset." It's a smart approach designed to teach students to deploy and operate an OpenStack environment that spans various host operating systems (RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS), virtualization technologies (KVM, vSphere), storage back-ends (Ceph, NetApp, EMC) and network topologies.
Mirantis, of coure, is already well-known for its years of experience offering training resources for OpenStack. Its certification program may be among the smartest around, though, because it takes into account the trends toward hybrid clouds and heteregenous environments--as well as virtualization--going on in IT departments and data centers.
“What enterprises are desperately looking for today is a standards based, cost effective control plane for a heterogeneous, multi-vendor infrastructure environment; and that is precisely the vision behind OpenStack,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and EVP at Mirantis, in a statement. “We believe that infrastructure experts who complete Mirantis Certification for OpenStack are best positioned to help enterprises realize this cloud vision.”
Mirantis Certification for OpenStack offers two levels of certification: Mirantis Certified Technician for OpenStack and Mirantis Certified Systems Administrator for OpenStack. Technician level certification will be a pre-requisite for Systems Administrator certification. The Mirantis Certified Technician exam is available for enrollment immediately. Certifications will not expire, but will be tied to a specific release of OpenStack in order to ensure that trainees are familiar with the nuances of the OpenStack version of their choice. Certification exams can be taken at any one of 700 Kryterion locations in over 100 countries. Krytrion offers test lab-type services, and is an independent entity.
One other interesting things about the training programs that Mirantis is rolling out is that lasses are capped at 12 students in order to ensure that each trainee is given a high level of personal attention. Also, students get a chance to talk to working cloud engineers and administrators and gain experience.
You can find out more about Mirantis' OpenStack certification offerings here.