(Photo: Simon Stratford, Creative Commons)
EdX and the Linux Foundation have partnered to offer a free online course on cloud infrastructure.
The massive open online course (MOOC) is called LFS151: An Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies, and it is now open for enrollment.
The course is part of edX’s recently-announced effort to include more content from non-academic institutions. It will be restructuring its membership system to allow for the expansion, and new edX members, aside from additional universities, include the International Monetary Fund, Warren Buffet’s family foundation, and the Smithsonian.
The course is aimed at developers, sysadmins, and other professionals who need to understand the basics of cloud computing and DevOps software.
It includes 12 chapters and accompanying quizzes with a final exam at the completion of the course. Students can participate in the entire course for free, but a certificate to show successful completion costs $99. Previously, the Linux Foundation taught the same course for $2,500, reports Fred O’Connor of PC World.
The course covers next-generation cloud technology like Docker, CoreOS, Kubernetes, and OpenStack, as well as providing an overview of software-defined storage, networking solutions, and continuous integration best practices. The fundamentals of all cloud platforms, open source and otherwise, will be covered, reports Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of ZDNet.
The course is taught by Chip Childers and Neependra Khare. Childers is the vice president of technology at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is an open-source platform-as-a-service industry consortium, and an engineer with more than 15 years of experience.
Neependra Khare is the author of Docker Cookbook, and offers training and consulting services dealing with container technologies. He has more than a decade of experience in the IT industry in a variety of positions, reports the Linux Foundation.
Registration is open now, but the course will begin in June. The exact date has not yet been announced.
This is the second course that that the Linux Foundation has offered on the edX platform. The other was Intro to Linux, which has had more than 500,000 students participants from all over the world. According to the CEO of edX, MIT Professor Anant Agarwal, it’s one of the most popular edX courses of all time.
Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, said:
The response to our first edX course was powerful, demonstrating the understanding among students and early career professionals all over the world that open source is the pathway to a lucrative career in technology.
With Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies, anyone can begin learning the fundamentals of building and managing some of today’s most pervasive software, giving professionals a strong position in the IT talent market.
According to Barry Levine of Venture Beat, the organization will also be offering a new paid Authorized Training Partner program.
The Linux Foundation is an organization that aids developers and companies in open technology development.
EdX was founded as a free online learning platform in 2012 in a partnership between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
