The Linux Foundation Delivers Self-Paced OpenStack Admin Course
Take a moment and think about it, and It's hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story isn't even 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. With that in mind, The Linux Foundation today announced the availability for purchase of its newest self-paced, online training course OpenStack Administration Fundamentals (LFS252). This is a 100 percent online, self-paced course for SysAdmins who are learning the skills necessary to prepare for the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam from the OpenStack Foundation.
"The course is based on the existing LFS520 -- Essentials of OpenStack Administration course, but offers the learning material in an online, self-paced format, reducing costs and increasing accessibility for students. In particular, students benefit from having access to a unique 'labs on demand' environment, which enables them to work on live OpenStack systems that are provisioned (and can be reset) on demand. The new course is available for registration now at $499, a $200 savings off the regular price of $699. The Certified OpenStack Administrator exam, which will be available in Q2 2016, will be offered as a standalone exam, or bundled with the course."
"We have built training and certification programs that we believe provide the most credible, provable skills for open source technologists and managers," said Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin. "The self-paced OpenStack admin course will advance a key area of technology innovation by equipping the IT workforce with the right skills at the right pace at the right time."
As OpenStack adoption has accelerated, a shortage of qualified OpenStack administrators has emerged. The Linux Foundation argues that existing OpenStack courses are led by an instructor and require a significant commitment to attend even the online courses at specific times and go through the material at a predetermined pace.
Enrollment is available for the Foundation's course, with access to the course materials and content beginning January 19th. More information can be found at https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses/system-administration-training/openstack-administration-fundamentals.
There are some other good resources for OpenStack training that we have covered. 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.
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 Training Marketplace designed to make it easier to discover training courses offered by providers in the OpenStack community.
And, Opensource.com has some excellent coverage of OpenStack tutorials, found here and here. As the site notes:
"In September, we gave tips for running OpenStack on FreeBSD, testing out OpenStack's newest incubated project, building an elastic Wordpress installation, and more."
"In June, we linked to guides for getting OpenStack play well with firewalld and NetworkManager, using Test Kitchen with Puppet on an OpenStack deployment, Kerberos, Docker containers, and getting started with OpenStack on Solaris."
"In May, we highlighted several excellent beginners' guides, tips on managing floating IPs, security and server hardening guides, an introduction to multi-node installation, and an overview of what is new in the most recent release of OpenStack Heat."
Finally, it is worth remembering that the official documentation for OpenStack is a valuable resource, too.