Closing the Skills Gap for Distributed Technology
Channel: LinuxConfAu 2018 - Sydney, Australia
Date: 2018-01-24

Florian Haas

http://lca2018.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/191/

The pace of technology in our industry continues to accelerate, particularly in the infrastructure space. In recent years, every new technology worth mentioning in infrastructure has been complex, distributed, and built for scale: OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes, Cumulus Linux, OVN... the list goes on.

As customers demand that infrastructure providers make these technologies available, and as those providers themselves identify the need to deploy them, you would think that the primary challenges they face are scalability, time-to-market, or cost. That is not the case. The primary challenge is finding people who know and understand these systems: we're dealing with a skills gap, not a technology gap.

This means that we need novel ways to educate professionals on these technologies. One excellent way of doing this is to use the capabilities of the Open edX platform to integrate it with hands-on, on-demand lab environments that can be just as complex, and just as distributed, as production systems. This allows anyone interested to develop a professional skill set on technologies like OpenStack, Ceph, or Kubernetes at minimal cost, from anywhere, and without the need for costly hardware platforms for evaluation. My team and I have operated several such platforms, including our own hastexo Academy and SUSE's SUSE Academy, for a couple of years, and we have made several contributions to the AGPL Open edX stack in the process. 

In this talk, I'll give an overview over the Open edX stack, the hastexo XBlock (the component that enables on-demand labs hosted in public clouds), and educational considerations for self-paced, on-line learning as they apply to professional training.

This talk was given at Linux.conf.au 2018 (LCA2018) which was held on 22-26 January 2018 in Sydney Australia.

linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see https://linux.conf.au/

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