OpenStack Foundation launched the new Certified OpenStack Administrator program. It aims to give cloud professionals an avenue to display their skills, as well as meet the increasing demand for cloud administrators in the business.
A Certified OpenStack Administrator is someone who has at least six months of professional OpenStack experience. According to the foundation, he or she should also have the necessary skills needed in the daily operation and management of an OpenStack cloud.
"OpenStack skills are in high demand as thousands of companies around the world adopt and productize OpenStack," says the foundation on its official site. "Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) is the first professional certification offered by the OpenStack Foundation. It's designed to help companies identify top talent in the industry, and help job seekers demonstrate their skills."
The foundation also notes that "Cloud Computing" was recently ranked at LinkedIn as 2015's "hottest global skill." Moreover, a data released from Indeed showed that job listings for OpenStack had increased by up to two times in 2015.
The COA exam will reportedly take 2.5 hours to accomplish and will use English as its medium. It is a performance-based exam wherein candidates are expected to accomplish tasks or solve problems through the Horizon dashboard and the command line interface.
In order to prepare admins for the certification program, OpenStack partnered with a number of companies for the training which ranged from 101 to advanced skills. A great majority of these companies has bundled the COA exam along with their own training courses.
Some of these partners include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Mirantis, Ubuntu, Solinea, Linux Academy, Rackspace and Suse among others.
Cloud computing is now a major challenge to companies as it brought the need to re-skill engineers and that it gave a new meaning to culture and processes, said Jonathan Bryce, executive director at the OpenStack Foundation.
The COA exam will at least provide a target to meet the increasing demand for cloud administrators because, after all, more and more organizations are adopting the OpenStack framework.
One of the key areas where a certification would be deemed as a most valuable achievement is the service providing companies. Telecommunications companies such as Verizon, Ericsson and AT&T have all built their public clouds based on OpenStack. Managed service providers such as Rackspace have established large scale private cloud services also based on the framework.
These service providers see COA as a way to allow them in scaling their clouds. Normally, clouds have several admins and not just one. As the scale of the OpenStack cloud increases, there is also the need for more admins.
Photo: Chris Potter | Flickr
