Monday, November 9, 2015

Certified OpenStack Administrator - Training consumers of OpenStack

OpenStack is quickly becoming the de-facto standard in cloud infrastructure software. There's no doubt that, in the past few years, OpenStack has quickly grown in both acceptance and footprint. Many companies worldwide are relying on OpenStack to run their most critical business applications and the list keeps growing.

Unfortunately, those same companies are challenged on a regular basis to hire talent who are familiar, or better yet, experts in the technology. The real problem at hand today is a lack of training and expertise to be able to qualify someone as an OpenStack professional. This is exactly the void that last weeks announcement of the Certified OpenStack Administrator certification is supposed to fill - only one problem, the focus of the exam content does not qualify someone as an OpenStack administrator.

I've been a contributor to the process for a majority of this year, having participated in building out a list of tasks that administrators generally perform (along with participants from nearly a dozen other companies who participate in the community). The foundation sent it out in the form a survey, which I hope many of you got and answered, and then used those survey results to create a list of tasks that an OpenStack administrator would perform, such as:

Launch an instance
Create a block storage volume
Mount a block storage volume to a compute instance
Generate and upload a SSH key
Login to Horizon

For a full listing see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q9hmsbjCY959clDMzxpWXdV15GWGjiEr1QNpQoQfjf4/edit?usp=sharing - The color coding indicates that green tasks are critical, yellow tasks are questionable, red tasks are out.

For those of you familiar with OpenStack administration, I hope you see a trend here and can spot the grave error. All of those tasks are what users of an OpenStack cloud do on a regular basis. Administrators have a much different daily task list, and a majority of them are not remotely reflected here. The content being tested is not related to the job of an administrator at all, but rather focuses on the skills necessary for a user or consumer to login and use an OpenStack cloud.

To make matters worse, I'm supposed to be participating in a panel of experts. One 'expert' said they could only work on one of the 13 domains, because that was the extent of their experience in OpenStack. Another expert took it upon himself to write 40% of the exam questions when there are 12 participants. It's just a big popularity contest, with the image of participating for their companies being worth more to some than the quality of the final product.

All in all, I believe the Foundation's efforts to develop a credible certification for OpenStack administrators is failing because the process is completely flawed. The process is very far along, yet the product we have come up with is not something I'm proud of at all.  The fact that other participants are not alarmed is also alarming. One said participant built the largest training program for OpenStack on the planet today. Another is a colleague who I co-authored a book with. Do they not see that the task list is this much off base?

Last week there was talk of revising the test every 3 years. I was the only person on the call aware of the fact that code from 3 years ago isn't even available for download. Really? The only one?

My advice is, if you're holding out for a credible OpenStack certification, look to the training marketplace and talk to companies like Mirantis, Aptira, RedHat and many others who have built a strong reputation in OpenStack training already. They are able to closely control the quality of their products, thus their offerings are more likely to be inline with what your company wants to quantify knowledge around - OpenStack Administration skills.

I continue to participate in the development of the COA exam with hope that the effort can be turned around. A 3 year refresh, testing on content that you can't download anymore and focusing on questions that are so rudimentary that, at best, the exam is a user certification is not going to cut it.