Rancher Labs launches free training course to meet surging demand for Kubernetes skills

Five-week course covers how to deploy Rancher and manage Kubernetes

In a recent Computing survey of UK IT leaders across all sizes and sectors, 16 per cent of respondents said they are using Kubernertes, an additional 5 per cent were about to begin and another 15 per cent researching it. Among those organisations using cloud-native technologies the usage rate is close to 80 per cent, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Other research by Dice Tech shows an 82 per cent increase in demand for individuals with Kubernetes skills over the past year.

To meet this surging demand for skills in the open-source container orchestration platform, Rancher Labs, which produces a number of Kubernetes distributions and tools of its own, is offering a free training course, designed by director of community and evangelism, Adrian Goins (pictured).

Rancher Academy is a five-week, self-paced course leading to a 'Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1' qualification.

It's pitched at individuals with some basic understanding of Docker and Kubernetes and access to multiple physical or virtual machines with at least two cores and 8GB of RAM per machine. The course is based on Rancher's RKE Kubernetes distribution, and could be seen as a canny way of grabbing punters in an increasingly competitive space.

"This Rancher certification is designed to help Kubernetes practitioners demonstrate their knowledge and competence with Kubernetes and Rancher," Goins said.

"Not only do we want all members of our community to have the most relevant and up-to-date skills on the industry's most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform. But we also want to empower them to be at the forefront of the cloud-native way of doing business, which is agile, open-source oriented and maniacally focused on fast access to innovation."

The training should appeal to "open-source practitioners, partners supporting their customers and end-user customers looking to maximise their investment in Kubernetes", the company says.

The initial five-week course will be followed up by further series later in the year.