Resources for Developing Valuable OpenStack Cloud Skills

How fast is the OpenStack services market growing? Technavio's analysts are out with a new report that forecasts the global OpenStack services market to grow at a CAGR of 32.90 percent over the period 2014-2019.

The report covers several major vendors focused on OpenStack, and among other findings, it forecasts that technical issues and difficulties surrounding OpenStack deployments will be on the increase. That falls in line with other emerging data showing that organizations are in need of skilled OpenStack workers. Are you interested in developing OpenStack skills? In this post, you'll find resources that can help you.

"OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline," Josh McKenty, who helped develop the platform, has told CRN, adding, "to be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware."

The OpenStack Training Marketplace, overseen by the OpenStack Foundation, is a good first stop. It is designed to make it easier to discover training courses offered by providers in the OpenStack community. 

Rackspace announced its first OpenStack traininc courses years ago, and now offers many educational opportunities. These include e-learning training courses and a number of new classroom courses focused on OpenStack. In fact, Rackspace has an entire curriculum of courses that you should investigate.

 Mirantis has steadily announced interesting training programs.  The company has also announced that hundreds of organizations around the world have turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on multiple platforms.  

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.  

Certification can make a difference in the job market, too. Don't forget that you can obtain valuable certification for OpenStack skills from some of the organizations mentioned in this post. Red Hat, for example, has announced its Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology. You can find out more about it in this post.