By Christophe Sauthier, Cloud Native Training and Certification Lead, CNCF
A recent CNCF micro-survey focused on training and certification revealed that the vast majority of IT professionals are eager to take new training courses or certifications. Respondents noted that getting certified is an excellent way to advance technical skills and feel more engaged and fulfilled in one’s work.
Having that in mind, the CNCF and the Linux Foundation are continuously expanding their training and certification catalog to provide new offers that reflect the diversity of the cloud native landscape from security and CI/CD to GitOps, networking, and service mesh.
The most recent KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Chicago welcomed the announcement of a recently released new certification in addition to three new e-Learning courses and two new certifications.
New Training
Security is one of the most important topics in today’s software and infrastructure landscape. Thus it is no surprise that our two e-Learning courses are directly related:
- Cloud Native Fuzzing Fundamentals (LFS251) is designed to equip IT professionals with the essential skills in fuzzing – a proven technique of software assurance.
- Detecting Cloud Runtime Threats with Falco (LFS254) to provide IT professionals, security analysts, and DevOps engineers with the expertise to fortify cloud native environments using the CNCF project Falco.
We also announced CI/CD with Tekton (LFS274), which is designed to give both technical and non-technical professionals the skills to effectively manage continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows using the Tekton framework.
Two New Certifications
The landscape is continuously growing, with projects becoming increasingly mature. Such is the case with Argo and Cilium which have both graduated within the last 10 months! To help upskill IT professionals on those projects, CNCF and Linux Foundation Training and Certification announced an upcoming certification for each of these CNCF projects.
The CAPA (Certified Argo project Associate) is an associate-level certification with a multiple choice question exam covering all the tools from the Argo project: Argo Workflows, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, and Argo Events. This vendor-neutral certification has been developed by a group of prominent members of the Argo community including Intuit, Red Hat, and Bank Hapoalim. It is led by Akuity, the company founded by the creators of the Argo Project.
The CCA (Cilium Certified Associate) is also an associate-level certification, with an exam consisting of multiple choice questions. CCA is also a vendor neutral certification, which was developed by experts from Microsoft, Solo.io, Conoa, Accenture, Datadog and led by Isovalent, the company of the creators of Cilium.
Keep an eye out, as both CAPA and CCA will be generally available by KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Paris.
General Availability of the Istio Certification
In late September, CNCF and Linux Foundation Training and Certification unveiled the Istio Certified Associate (ICA) certification, the famous service mesh project that graduated in 2023. The ICA exam, which aims to validate the knowledge of practitioners with 6 months of experience with Istio, is a mix of hands-on scenarios and multiple choice questions. We were thrilled to be able to announce during the opening keynote of the Istio Day at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon that the certification is now available!
Office Hours for Training and Certification and the Growing Community
The Training and Certification team aims to make these learning paths understandable and accessible by as many people as possible, but there are always questions to be asked or recommendations to be made. With this in mind, the first Office Hours session dedicated to CNCF training and certification was held live at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. Building on this success, further sessions will be added very soon. These sessions, which will be held remotely, will enable the entire community to exchange views on these subjects. If you’d like to find out more, or to be kept informed of future events around CNCF training and certification, we strongly invite you to subscribe to our dedicated mailing list.