Companies in diverse industries are increasingly building applications designed to run in the cloud at a massive, distributed scale. That means they are also seeking talent with experience deploying and managing such cloud native applications using containers in microservices architectures.
Kubernetes has quickly become the most popular container orchestration tool according to The New Stack, and thus is a hot new area for career development as the demand for IT practitioners skilled in Kubernetes has also surged. Apprenda, which runs its PaaS on top of Kubernetes, reported a spike in Kubernetes job postings this summer, and the need is only growing.
To meet this demand, The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation today announced they have partnered to provide training and certification for Kubernetes.
The Linux Foundation will offer training through a free, massive open online course (MOOC) on edX as well as a self-paced, online course. The MOOC will cover the introductory concepts and skills involved, while the online course will teach the more advanced skills needed to create and configure a real-world working Kubernetes cluster.
The training course will be available soon, and the MOOC and certification program are expected to be available in 2017. The course is open now at the discounted price of $99 (regularly $199) for a limited time. Sign up here to pre-register for the course.
The course curriculum will also be open source and available on GitHub, Dan Kohn, CNCF Executive Director, said in his keynote today at CloudNativeCon in Seattle.
Certification will be offered by Kubernetes Managed Service Providers (KMSP) trained and certified by the CNCF. Nine companies with experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Kubernetes are committing engineers to participate in a CNCF working group that will develop the certification requirements. These early supporters include Apprenda, Canonical, Cisco, Container Solutions, CoreOS, Deis, Huawei, LiveWyer, and Samsung SDS. The companies are also interested in becoming certified KMSPs once the program is available next year.
Kubernetes is a software platform that makes it easier for developers to run containerized applications across diverse cloud infrastructures — from public cloud providers, to on-premise clouds and bare metal. Core functions include scheduling, service discovery, remote storage, autoscaling, and load balancing.
Google originally engineered the software to manage containers on its Borg infrastructure, but open sourced the project in 2014 and donated it earlier this year to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation at The Linux Foundation. It is now one of the most active open source projects on GitHub and has been one of the fastest growing projects of all time with a diverse community of contributors.
“Kubernetes has the opportunity to become the new cloud platform,” said Sam Ghods, a co-founder and Services Architect at Box, in his keynote at CloudNativeCon. “We have the opportunity to do what AWS did for infrastructure but this time in an open, universal, community-driven way.”
With more than 170 user groups worldwide, it’s already easy to hire people who are experts in Kubernetes, said Chen Goldberg, director of engineering for the Container Engine and Kubernetes team at Google, in her keynote at CloudNativeCon.
The training and certification from CNCF and The Linux Foundation will go even further to help develop the pool of Kubernetes talent worldwide.
Pre-register now for the online, self-paced Kubernetes Fundamentals course from The Linux Foundation and pay only $99 ($100 off registration)!
