OpenStack Educational Resources Are Spreading Out
OpenStack, the headline-grabbing open source cloud platform, is giving rise to a slew of top tech jobs. If you have OpenStack skills, you can work for big companies doing cloud deployments or startups focusing on OpenStack managed services. Here on OStatic, we're doing regular coverage of the best ways to get certified as an OpenStack expert, and you'll find our latest roundup of resources in this post.
Demand for workers with open source cloud computing skills has been steadily rising, and The OpenStack Foundation is reporting that demand for professionals with OpenStack cloud skills in particular is really picking up pace. I've covered The OpenStack Foundation's announcement that it launched a new 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.
Rackspace has delivered many on-demand e-learning training courses and a number of new classroom courses focused on OpenStack. Aptira, 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. It looks like this will be one of the first places to check if you want to pick up OpenStack skills.
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.
Red Hat has launched its IaaS OpenStack Certification program, and its worth looking into the many OpenStack training resources that Mirantis has been offering. Mirantis is 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.
Also note that as you pick up OpenStack skills, it's worth brusing up on skillsets that complement cloud computing requirements. For example, opensource.com has a post up about free online courses, which notes the following:
"Also worth mentioning are a pair of UC Berkeley courses, available online through EdX, entitled Software as a Service and Engineering Software as a Service. These courses, taught to the Ruby on Rails platform and focuses not just on the technology itself but on agile development methodologies for continuous release design."
"The open source cloud runs on Linux, and so if you're not familiar with Linux, you need to be. Fortunately, edX and the Linux Foundation have a course for that."