Mirantis Launches OpenStack Certification Program

Study Shows Organizations That Provide Training Have Higher Project Success

With interest in OpenStack rising across the enterprise, a lot of IT professionals should be able to count on some new opportunities opening up in 2014, provided, of course, that they know how OpenStack works.

As part of an ongoing OpenStack education effort, Mirantis, a provider of an OpenStack distribution, has launched a vendor-agnostic OpenStack certification program for both traditional administrators inside enterprise IT organizations and cloud service providers.

According to Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel, the Mirantis Certification for OpenStack program is the first in a series of certification programs that Mirantis plans to roll out in 2014.

With interest in OpenStack as an alternative to rival cloud management platforms from companies such as VMware, Microsoft and Amazon on the rise, Ionel says the one key challenge facing OpenStack in 2014 is making sure there’s enough skilled talent available to implement it.

To give those folks implementing OpenStack some sense of their success with OpenStack, Mirantis is also working with IBM to create a set of Rally benchmarking tools for testing OpenStack performance. While IBM will bring to market its own distribution of OpenStack, Ionel says it’s important that backers of OpenStack work together to create a common set of standard performance benchmarks.

OpenStack clearly still has a long way to go before it sees mainstream adoption. But there’s enough interest in OpenStack to make it almost a foregone conclusion that an open source approach to managing virtualization in the age of the cloud is going to gain a lot of traction, assuming, of course, enough administrators who understand how it works are available.