OpenStack Projects: Training

This post originally ran on Sean Roberts blog. Sean is a current OpenStack Board Director plus he works with all things related to OpenStack and Software Defined Infrastructure at Yahoo. He is co-leading the OpenStack community training project which aims to provide instruction materials for all OpenStack user groups. You should follow him on Twitter.

This is the second of a ten part series on OpenStack projects. There are critical OpenStack projects that get a bit lost in the noise. I aim to highlight why these projects are important and how you can get involved.

The OpenStack Training project is open sourced training. The project’s most basic function is to provide a syllabus for the many OpenStack user groups. As new people get interested in OpenStack, the Training Guides are a low bar way of learning what OpenStack is. OpenStack however, is not an easy subject to teach for the variety of student backgrounds.

For the most likely student, the traditional operations engineer, introducing software defined infrastructure and other concepts like agile development is nothing less than skill transition . Before closing the gap on OpenStack knowledge with installing open source software, deep diving on APIs, and fully understanding the CI pipeline, we need to get the student to a middle ground where they are ready to be taught agile development. Depending on the person’s background, getting to the point where this material would be useful could be days or months.

That why we broke the Training Guides up into four parts; Associate, Operator, Developer, and Architect. The Associate learns the basics of OpenStack architecture and how to interact with a working OpenStack cluster. The Operator learns more details about an OpenStack cluster by installing the software piece by piece. A working OpenStack cluster is also used as reference. The Developer learns the OpenStack APIs through a django based project and the OpenStack CI pipeline in-depth. The Architect focuses on a specific OpenStack project as a specialization and becomes a working member of that project. The Architect training will be all about becoming a functioning member of the OpenStack open source community.

If you are interested in OpenStack training, then you need to get involved. Your participation can range from providing background on what operators need for skill transition in the weekly meetings and/or to contributing material. This project is growing and needs experienced trainers and developers of training to get involved and contribute.

Training meets weekly Mondays 1700 UTC or 1000 PDT on irc.freenode.net channel #openstack-meeting-alt. The IRC meeting source of truth is here.

Past meeting notes can be found here. http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/training-manuals

For all the details, the OpenStack Training project wiki page is here. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/training-manuals