Mirantis' vendor-agnostic certification program for OpenStack gains momentum

Mirantis says that more than 200 companies and organisations around the world had used the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on the platform of their choice.

Mirantis' Certification for OpenStack (MCA-100) is unique in that it certifies infrastructure professionals on their capabilities to deploy and operate vendor-agnostic OpenStack environments not tied to a particular OpenStack distribution. Professionals awarded the certification are able to configure an OpenStack environment that spans various host operating systems (RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS), virtualization technologies (KVM, vSphere), storage back-ends (Ceph, NetApp, EMC) and network topologies.

"I found the MCA-100 exam compared favorably to rigorous certifications like VCP and CISSP," said Ramiro Salas, a technology specialist at VMWare who recently completed his MCA-100 certification. "The technological independence that Mirantis professes is accurately reflected on the exam and I highly recommend the course."

Enterprises benefiting from Mirantis' training and certification for OpenStack are leaders in diverse industries including telecommunications, technology, financial services, consulting and retail and include companies like Accenture, AT&T, Booz Allen, British Telecom, Charles Schwab, Expedia, Orange, SAP and JP Morgan.
"The MCA-100 was a challenging exam covering a wide spectrum of technologies ranging from individual OpenStack components to deployment and operations," said Steven Sonnenberg, Solution Consultant at Hitachi Data Systems. "To prepare I used the material provided by Mirantis, along with their own branded OpenStack documentation. I also attended the Mirantis Bootcamp training from which I highly benefitted and which I strongly recommend for general OpenStack training."

Certification exams are offered at any one of 700 Kryterion locations in over 100 countries. Kryterion has been a world leader in test development and delivery since 2001. In addition, professionals can be certified at home or at work using Kryterion online proctoring methodology.

Prior to taking the certification exam, individuals may gain more confidence with OpenStack through Mirantis' onsite OpenStack Bootcamp courses (with both two and three day options available), but taking the Mirantis course is not a pre-requisite for enrolment in the certification exam.

Mirantis takes a unique approach to training, emphasizing a hands-on, problem solving methodology. Nearly three-quarters of the training provided by Mirantis is hands-on with the explicit goal of giving engineers the power to stand up OpenStack distributions from scratch. The hands-on emphasis of Mirantis OpenStack training is supplemented by select classroom instruction sessions aimed at helping trainees understand the conceptual underpinnings of OpenStack deployment.