Mohamed El-Refaey

Cloudonomics Journal on Ulitzer

Though am not that fond of certificates in general and believe in practical hands-on to the extremes, it looks that within two years I should be aware of the training kits and certificates exist for cloud computing and virtualization technology :) ...

3Tera (Cloud Computing Platform and services company) announced today their cloud computing certifications and education offerings ...

Mark Ortenzi, president of 3Tera partner CariNet, mentioned that

"If you don't do it, in two years you won't have a business,"
According to these announcements there will be two tracks for these certificates:

1. The Certified Cloud Operator program which is targeted at service providers, enterprises, operations professionals and system integrators who deploy and operate cloud services. It covers installing, configuring and maintaining the computing fabric used for building cloud computing services. The certification has emphasis on hardware requirements, service configuration, hardware failure troubleshooting, provisioning of customers and configuration of virtual private data centers.
2. The the Certified Cloud Architect program, is aimed at systems architects, IT operations professionals, application developers and systems engineers who design, integrate, provision, deploy and manage distributed applications. That certification teaches the architectural concepts of 3Tera's AppLogic cloud computing platform, step-by-step deployment procedures, operating and managing applications in the cloud, best practices for security, testing and scaling applications and how to architect for business continuity.

It worth mentioning that Rackspace, Amazon (EC2) and Microsoft Windows Azure have training kits and education available, but yet they don't have cloud comuting certifications.

We should keep an eye on these vendors in their offerings in the near future ...