Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking a 2-day OpenStack training by Mirantis in New York City. It was well worth it because up until this point I had never been hands-on with OpenStack and more relevant for me, never had a deep dive on the underlying architecture. Plus it’s always good to get time out of the office and do a deep dive into a new technology.
Going through the OpenStack architecture was really what I wanted to get smart around. I’ll have to admit, it’s still not 100% or anywhere near it for me, but the needle is moving in the right direction. That’s what counts, right? The following picture is a sample of one of the first slides that was covered in the class. We then went deeper into each section.
Source: Mirantis
For some reason, it still seems rare to have someone teaching about OpenStack who can make some analogies and comparisons to Enterprise tech like VMware and AWS or even understand basic data center network designs. Especially around OpenStack Networking (Quantum/Neutron), it should be a given to articulate how a SDN controller would be integrated.
Some other interesting points…
When we did introductions in the beginning of the class, the majority stated they were there for a deeper dive into the networking side of OpenStack. I was only 1 of 2 people who was there and didn’t have previous hands-on experience with OpenStack. At this point, I think I need to get some OpenStack deep dive documents or have a whiteboard session with someone 1:1 to take it to the next level, especially around Neutron.
There is a lot of talk around commodity network switches these days usually in conjunction with network virtualization. I was surprised to see the amount of conversation around commodity everything in the OpenStack class – my guess is the same sentiment is seen throughout the greater OpenStack community.
If you are an entrepreneur and have a knack for teaching, understand OpenStack, AWS, and VMware technology, I suggest you start an official OpenStack training center. Mirantis is one of only a few companies doing training today, which is awesome for them and I’d definitely recommend their class, but if you google OpenStack training (I did while in the class), I didn’t get many results from companies who were offering training TODAY. The market is wide open.
The biggest problem I still see is the amount of assumed knowledge when talking about OpenStack. The assumed knowledge is DevOps products and technologies like Cobbler, Chef, Puppet, Fuel, CFEngine, and that is just to name a few, and quite frankly, to breakdown what OpenStack components/projects really are. I’m a stickler on understanding form factor of a component, i.e. is that a process, daemon, virtual machine, physical host, application, GUI, etc. These basic things go a long way especially around something [so new] like OpenStack.
Overall, the vibe from the class is that most are testing, but seriously looking at OpenStack. There were people in the class from upstate NY, NYC, NJ, and also a quite a few from Virginia just to give you a feel of the geographic diversity and to show people are going out of their way to learn this stuff.
I’m more than happy to discuss my experience more. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or contact me privately.
Closing Thought…
My employer has been pretty good to me with going to conferences and such over the past year, so I do want to point out I paid for this training out of pocket and took PTO to attend. I actually didn’t even ask to get it approved. I point this out because things are changing in the industry and some personal investment and sacrifice is sometimes needed to stay ahead. Often engineers do not want to do this, but after you're finished, you won't regret it.
Thanks,
Jason
Twitter: @jedelman8
Some other interesting points…
When we did introductions in the beginning of the class, the majority stated they were there for a deeper dive into the networking side of OpenStack. I was only 1 of 2 people who was there and didn’t have previous hands-on experience with OpenStack. At this point, I think I need to get some OpenStack deep dive documents or have a whiteboard session with someone 1:1 to take it to the next level, especially around Neutron.
There is a lot of talk around commodity network switches these days usually in conjunction with network virtualization. I was surprised to see the amount of conversation around commodity everything in the OpenStack class – my guess is the same sentiment is seen throughout the greater OpenStack community.
If you are an entrepreneur and have a knack for teaching, understand OpenStack, AWS, and VMware technology, I suggest you start an official OpenStack training center. Mirantis is one of only a few companies doing training today, which is awesome for them and I’d definitely recommend their class, but if you google OpenStack training (I did while in the class), I didn’t get many results from companies who were offering training TODAY. The market is wide open.
The biggest problem I still see is the amount of assumed knowledge when talking about OpenStack. The assumed knowledge is DevOps products and technologies like Cobbler, Chef, Puppet, Fuel, CFEngine, and that is just to name a few, and quite frankly, to breakdown what OpenStack components/projects really are. I’m a stickler on understanding form factor of a component, i.e. is that a process, daemon, virtual machine, physical host, application, GUI, etc. These basic things go a long way especially around something [so new] like OpenStack.
Overall, the vibe from the class is that most are testing, but seriously looking at OpenStack. There were people in the class from upstate NY, NYC, NJ, and also a quite a few from Virginia just to give you a feel of the geographic diversity and to show people are going out of their way to learn this stuff.
I’m more than happy to discuss my experience more. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or contact me privately.
Closing Thought…
My employer has been pretty good to me with going to conferences and such over the past year, so I do want to point out I paid for this training out of pocket and took PTO to attend. I actually didn’t even ask to get it approved. I point this out because things are changing in the industry and some personal investment and sacrifice is sometimes needed to stay ahead. Often engineers do not want to do this, but after you're finished, you won't regret it.
Thanks,
Jason
Twitter: @jedelman8
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