OpenStack certifications can open career opportunities
Since its initial introduction in the form of a joint project between NASA and Rackspace Hosting in 2010, OpenStack has gone onto become a genuine industry phenomenon. Today, hundreds of companies support this initiative — including AT&T, Avaya, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, VMware and many others — and OpenStack is taking an increasingly important role in data centers for managing pools of processing, storage and networking resources. Accordingly, OpenStack certifications are popping up all over the place as numerous players seek to help IT professionals take advantage of, and cash in on, this remarkable technology platform.
The organization with custody over this dynamic open-source software environment is the OpenStack Foundation, which currently numbers over 850 members, and has raised more than $10 million in funding to help turn OpenStack into what the foundation itself calls "the ubiquitous cloud computing platform." Individual membership in the OpenStack Foundation is free, just like the software it makes available to the public, where individual members provide support through various types of "sweat equity" such as community building or technical contributions.
Larger commercial concerns provide financial support in the forms of various levels of membership, such as Platinum, Gold, and Corporate level sponsorships (see the Companies page for a list of who's playing in this part of the OpenStack field). It's also interesting to observe that OpenStack apparently cuts across most (or all) IT market niches, and includes hardware companies, software companies, service providers, infrastructure providers, and more, amongst its ranks.
One clear sign of OpenStack's growing market synergy and momentum is a growing body of players offering training (to a larger extent) and certification (to a lesser extent) on the subject matters involved. Here's a short and hopefully interesting list of current players who offer training and/or certification that takes OpenStack as its primary or exclusive focus. This should be an interesting list to maintain, because I expect it to keep growing by massive leaps and bounds, just as the whole OpenStack space is doing. The entries are provided in alphabetical order by sponsor or provider organization name:
Most of these programs are less than two years old, and several (most notably CCC, Tesora, and HP) are still in design and development phases. There are already more than half-a-dozen such programs available or in the offering, however, with many more sure to follow in the months and years ahead.
Ed Tittel is a 30-plus-year computer industry veteran who's worked as a software developer, technical marketer, consultant, author, and researcher. Author of many books and articles, Ed also writes on certification topics for Tech Target, ComputerWorld and Win10.Guru. Check out his website at www.edtittel.com, where he also blogs daily on Windows 10 and 11 topics.
