Cloud Foundry certification launches
At the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., the Cloud Foundry Foundation officially rolled out its Cloud Foundry Certified Developer (CFCD) program. Why should you care? Because more than half of the Fortune 500 have turned to Cloud Foundry for their cloud application development.
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The Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is no longer just a promising idea. At the Summit, top-flight enterprises such as Comcast, AllState, and SAP are moving their application development to Cloud Foundry, which is also now available on the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
They're doing this because, as Greg Otto, Comcast's executive director of cloud computing said, "It saves us half our development time."
"It does this," said Eric Johnson, a Google Cloud Platform tech lead, in part, "by letting you abstract the differences between clouds for developers." Programmers can work on programs and not worry about the underlying infrastructure.
What this means for businesses is they can quickly and easily build enterprise programs. If SAP, the poster-child for enterprise proprietary software, can build applications on Cloud Foundry and release its own Cloud Foundry take, SAP Cloud Platform, it is crystal-clear Cloud Foundry has taken off as a business development platform.
According to a recent Dice salary survey, Cloud Foundry developers are among the top five highest-paid developers.
This new developer certification is offered via a Linux Foundation partnership. The course is being offered from global partners including: Biarca, CapGemini, Cognizant, Dell EMC, EngineerBetter, Fast Lane, IBM, Innovivi, Linux Foundation, Pivotal, Resilient Scale, SAP, Stark & Wayne, and Swisscom.
"We knew the need for cloud-native skills was significant, but the response to this program has been explosive," said Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation, in a statement. "After a gradual program rollout over the last couple months -- training 5,000 developers on the way -- CFCD is now generally available. This was conceived and developed to solve the demand of developer productivity for the many Fortune 500 organizations using Cloud Foundry."
CFCD helps developers set themselves apart whether they're looking for a first job or upgrading their current role. The program certifies programmers across all certified Cloud Foundry distributions including Atos Cloud Foundry, Huawei FusionStage, IBM Bluemix Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, SAP Cloud Platform, and Swisscom Application Cloud.
The CFCD program suite includes:
- A free introductory course offered via the edX platform.
- A self-paced eLearning Cloud Foundry Developer course.
- A training partner program, which includes licensed materials for in-person or e-learning
- "Cloud Foundry Certified Developer" Certification, awarded to individuals who pass a performance-based exam.
Candidates for the certification exam should have hands-on practical experience building software that runs on Cloud Foundry. Topics covered in the exam include:
- Cloud Foundry basics
- Cloud-native architectural principles
- Troubleshooting applications on Cloud Foundry
- Cloud-native application security
- Working with services in Cloud Foundry
- Application management on Cloud Foundry
- Container management within Cloud Foundry
- Aptitude in modifying simple Java, Node.js and Ruby applications
The certification exam takes up to four hours to complete and can be taken online for $300. Discounts are available for bundled and bulk pricing purchases.
Developers can get the Cloud Foundry for Developers course for just $1 when purchasing the exam at regular price -- a savings of almost $500 -- until June 23.
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