Cloud Hosting

Rackspace Hosting has initiated a new effort to help the cloud community grab some attractive certifications, in the form of OpenStack Fundamentals. This offering is based on teaching materials that hosting company developed internally for a course called OpenStack Fundamentals, which has been available for the past year. It is a four-day course with six hours of personal instruction that has been given to hundreds of students in 50 countries already.

The course costs $2,500 per student, if you come to a Rackspace class, and a whopping $45,000 if but you want to get the course privately in your facility. That private class size is limited to 18 students, which again works out to the same $2,500 per person.

Introducing this cloud computing certification is a step toward achieving the mission of making OpenStack the de facto cloud standard. And the good thing is that the company is looking ahead for the certification holders to be absorbed in good positions in the industry.

And some of those positions are expected to focus on DevOps:

We are seeing more cloud-specific jobs. Cloud is such a hot topic, youll see a lot of companies looking for cloud technologists, although cloud may not be in the title. There are a lot of people looking for DevOps engineers, for example. DevOps and cloud walk together a lot. We see an uptake in companies using cloud in general, and theyre going to need IT professionals to power and run those clouds, said Tony Campbell, Director of training and certification at Rackspace.

We plan to offer an application developer certification for software developers who are writing cloud-enabled apps. The cloud brings a new way and new capabilities to software development, and its important that engineers are up to speed on how [to] leverage cloud in their software. Up until now there has been a hard line between software and hardware; with cloud, that line becomes blurry to where the software can interact with the hardware and can expand and contract hardware resources directly from the software. We want to teach people how to do that.

Once you are done with your coursework, youll have to take a test which involves working with a running OpenStack cluster. And passing test makes you an OpenStack Certified Technician. The test will be available in December, while the pricing has not been informed yet. Rackspace has also launched a partner program that will allow third parties that are interested in using its coursework to provide training and therefore help drive up certifications. The same will also start in December.

Read the rest here:
How Will Rackspace Hosting OpenStack Cloud Computing Certification Affect DevOps?