OpenStack in Focus: Soundbytes From This Week
This past couple of weeks have brought a lot of interesting news related to the OpenStack cloud computing platform. There have been some notable new OpenStack distributions arriving, and some very compelling instructional and educational material has shown up as well.
Here is an overview of the headlines not to miss.
What is OpenStack? Rich Bowen of Red Hat gave a comprehensive summary of OpenStack as a software project, an open source foundation, and a community of organizations in his talk at LinuxCon North America. Linux.com has a good story on his talk, and reports the following:
OpenStack is a community organization. From its humble beginning, OpenStack has grown to more than 55,000 members, including more than 600 companies. The foundation covers 57 separate, semi-autonomous projects, which could be viewed as a semi-organized cat herd.
Bowen says, "The projects themselves make their own technical decisions. Now, they have to submit to the judgment of the technical committee, because interoperability between projects is obviously pretty important. The technical decisions, the road maps are decided at the project level rather than at the foundation level.”
New Distributions. Both Red Hat and Mirantis have rolled out new OpenStack distributions. Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, its latest open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments. It's based on the OpenStack community “Mitaka” release, and Red Hat says it offers customers a more secure, production-ready automated cloud platform integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, and Red Hat CloudForms for hybrid cloud management and monitoring.
We covered the news in full here.
Moves from Mirantis. Meanwhile, Mirantis, one of the leaders in the OpenStack arena, is out with Mirantis OpenStack 9.0, which is targeted to make launching and running private clouds much easier. Based on the Mitaka Openstack release, version 9.0 of Mirantis' platform includes many features aimed to simplify lifecycle management of OpenStack. Get the story here.
A New, Free Class. The Linux Foundation is collaborating with edX to offer an online course titled, LFS152x. The comprehensive OpenStack Introduction course includes seven chapters, and a quiz at the end of each chapter. There is a required final exam, but here is the great news: the complete course is available at no cost. Students can obtain a certificate of completion for $99.
The Introduction to OpenStack course is described as follows on the edX site:
OpenStack is growing at an unprecedented rate, with over 65% of OpenStack deployments now in production - a number which continues to rise. The demand for individuals who have experience managing this cloud platform is also accelerating. According to the Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and Dice, 51% of hiring managers say experience with OpenStack and other cloud technologies are driving open source hiring decisions. Now is the time to build an exciting and rewarding career managing OpenStack clouds.
This introductory course is taught by cloud experts from The Linux Foundation, which also delivers the Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam.