Mirantis Leads Drive on OpenStack Training

Company organizes training to meet rapidly growing demand for OpenStack expertise.

Mountain View, Calif., (PRWEB) February 13, 2012 —

Mirantis, a leader in engineering services for OpenStack™ Cloud, and CloudCamp, a noted organizer of cloud training and idea exchanges, have teamed up to deliver a series of training courses in OpenStack technology. The program will expand the pool of skilled engineering talent and expertise that a growing number of enterprises require in order to create, deploy, and maintain OpenStack solutions.

“It is great to see the community taking an active role in evangelizing OpenStack and spreading the knowledge,” said Stefano Maffulli, OpenStack Community Manager. “We are happy to see companies like Mirantis focus on education and training to meet the high demand for OpenStack talent and drive adoption of the technology.”

It is great to see the community taking an active role in evangelizing OpenStack and spreading the knowledge. We are happy to see companies like Mirantis focus on education and training to meet the high demand for OpenStack talent.

OpenStack is an open source platform for building private and public infrastructure clouds. More than 145 leading companies participate in the OpenStack project, including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, Intel, and Microsoft. It originally started with NASA and Rackspace®.

Without a substantial training effort now, there will probably be significant shortages in knowledgeable and skilled engineers who can develop OpenStack solutions for all of the enterprises that will want to use the open source platform.
“Hiring enough OpenStack architects today is very difficult, given the rapid rate of OpenStack adoption we are seeing with our enterprise customers,” explained Boris Renski, EVP and co-founder, Mirantis. “If training opportunities aren’t expanded, it will be virtually impossible to hire experts in OpenStack .”
Companies associated with the OpenStack community are addressing this demand in different ways. Rackspace began a training program in the fall. There have also been some training opportunities at various conferences and meetups. CloudCamp hosted a training workshop in Sunnyvale in November. Piston and Citrix have been holding meetups on OpenStack, but no formal training programs.

Mirantis has stepped up both its recruitment and advanced training for OpenStack developers. In addition, the company opened a Center of Excellence for OpenStack last fall. With that move, Mirantis developed an internal training program to expand the expertise of its own engineers, especially those with experience in networking and computer programming languages, such as Python. Now, Mirantis is partnering with CloudCamp and sharing its internal curriculum and training practices to build a publicly-available training program in OpenStack.

“We believe there is a definite growth trend for technical expertise and skills in this area. We have established a major practice area for OpenStack, with about 25 engineers solely devoted to OpenStack projects for clients. We expect customer demand will double that number by spring,” Renski continued.

California-based Mirantis has been an active member of the OpenStack community since its inception and has contributed multiple code commits to the OpenStack Compute and Identity projects. Mirantis is also one of the key organizers of the Bay Area’s OpenStack user group, hosting the quarterly community events in Silicon Valley. This OpenStack community grew from 100 to more than 900 members in less than nine months in 2011. Mirantis is also focused on expanding the OpenStack community in Russia because of the growing interest there among developers.

The new training courses from Mirantis and CloudCamp will be conducted by Mirantis architects with experience in OpenStack, as well as a number of OpenStack community volunteers. Workshops will be held at the CloudCamp Silicon Valley Cloud Center in Sunnyvale.

“Having already conducted some OpenStack-focused events and workshops in collaboration with Mirantis, we see that the OpenStack community could benefit greatly from a more structured and ongoing training program,” noted Dave Nielsen, CloudCamp founder. “Our expertise gained from community-driven training and idea exchanges and our Sunnyvale Cloud Center will be an excellent foundation to facilitate this training program.”

Unlike traditional courses, the program will consist of a series of online videos and tutorials that students will explore on their own, prior to enrolling in a hands-on, in-person workshops. The workshops will then allow students to collaborate on a variety of exercises under the supervision of architects experienced with OpenStack.

The first training event will cover mainly OpenStack Compute (Nova) and Image Service (Glance). It is aimed at systems engineers and cloud architects who want to familiarize themselves with the OpenStack platform. The course will cover OpenStack architecture and key features, taking students step-by-step through multi-server deployments of OpenStack Compute. It will also cover image and instance management and have a section dedicated to troubleshooting of OpenStack deployments.

Basic courses, covering the very fundamentals of OpenStack Compute deployment and administration, will be available for free, as a courtesy of Mirantis and CloudCamp. A series of advanced, fee-based courses will be introduced later.

The official schedule and registration details are at Training for OpenStack™. While the initial training series will be conducted under the CloudCamp umbrella and hosted by Mirantis, there is a long-term plan to completely open source all course materials and training curriculum, enabling the OpenStack community to self-propagate at a yet even more rapid pace.