Which Cloud Certification?

I often get to hear  this query from my peers, friends and ex-colleagues: I am interested to know and learn about Cloud Computing; which course or certification I should go for?

Well, that's a tricky question and the answer lies much on from what background you have come from. But since I am from Infrastructure background, mostly my folks want to know about Iaas (Infrastructure As A Service) side of the Cloud. In this past one year, I have done fair amount of my own research into the exciting world of Cloud Computing and this is what I would like to share with you...

At the very outset, to jump into Cloud Computing, you need to have the theoretical basics more than the hands on. Once you understand the Theory Part of Cloud Computing, understanding practical is quite easy.

I highly recommend people to go for Rackspace's (a top Cloud Provider in Public Cloud segment) CloudU certification. This is vendor neutral since Rackspace itself is built on and promotes Open-Source based "OpenStack" Cloud Computing Tools. The curriculum covers pretty much basics on Cloud Computing and walks through different cases, examples and concepts. There are 10 videos (webinars) which needed to be watched which means to pass this certification you need to understand clearly the concepts covered in these 10 videos. The link for the videos: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/cloudu/curriculum  There are also Whitepapers associated with each Webinar/Video which can read and you need to answer the questions when you register for CloudU.

Another one which I myself have attended and received the Cloud Certification is from EXIN. EXIN provides a Cloud Computing Fundamentals Certification which is absolutely vendor neutral and quite extensive and yet lucid in terms of understanding. You can either do a self study and then register for an exam with EXIN or it's partners or else you can attend 2 days Full Time Course (8-9 hours each day) from any EXIN partner. At the end of the 2nd day session, one EXIN External Examiner will distribute the hard copy of the question papers and you need to write down the answers, although the questions are single/multiple choice questions. I had completed my training and certification in Bangalore, India and it costed me 15,000 INR including the course fee and exam fee. Refer to this link for further information: http://www.exin.com/us/en/exams/&exam=exin-cloud-computing-foundation

There are other certifications like CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge) which is highly regarded in the industry, but I strongly feel it is most suited for people coming from Security background or people willing to go to Cloud Security field. And it is quite difficult and extensive study as well.

Cloud Certification from IBM didn't excite me much since their middleware's like Websphere is not much in dominance in the Cloud Market, to be frank. And IBM Cloud Certification is very much IBM product oriented. If you come from the same background, you can go for it or else discard.

Now talking about VMware vCloud, I myself is officially trained by VMware on vCloud and I have been working on VMware vCloud. It is definitely not for beginners! You need solid vSphere knowledge along with a basic knowledge in Cloud Fundamentals (covered in CloudU or EXIN like curriculum). Also you need good amount of understanding of Networking as a whole and Networking in vSphere, like Distributed Switch etc. If you are still interested, you can get an idea on vCloud from my earlier blog post. And it is like IBM, absolutely proprietary and talks only about VMware's Cloud Offerings.

There are couple more places to go for learning. One I highly recommend is Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Cloud. You can get plenty of information on AWS and different service offerings from AWS work by watching at their Official Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices/videos?view=0  There are Excellent Getting Started Guides as well with step by step documents: http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/gettingstarted/ You can look into the AWS Reference Architectures as well in case you want to go deeper and want to know more about different AWS components like EC2, S3, CloudFront, Route53, RDS etc.

You can start knowing about Eucalyptus or OpenStack as well through their websites and resource materials like Getting Started Guides. But I will recommend to jump into either of these two only if you are little familiar to the world of Linux (or OpenSource as a whole)

Feel free to contact me via this blog or Twitter: @amitabhpancham if you have a question