Cloud Foundry to Bridge Critical Developer Gap with Launch of World’s Largest Cloud-Native Developer Certification Initiative: Cloud Foundry Certified Developer

Responding to an impending critical shortage of developers, Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry-standard platform for cloud applications, today announced the launch of the world’s largest cloud-native developer certification initiative. The “Cloud Foundry Certified Developer” program will be delivered in partnership with the Linux Foundation, responsible for training and certifying more developers on open source software than any organisation in the world. General availability of the program will be announced at Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley in June 2017.

Businesses around the world need more skilled developers: there are a quarter-million job openings for software developers in the US alone, half a million unfilled jobs that require tech skills, and the forecast grows to one million within the next decade.

The new Cloud Foundry Developer Certification helps developers set themselves apart when looking for a first job or upgrading their current role. Performance-based, community-based and independent of any distribution vendor, Cloud Foundry Developer Certification is the guaranteed way to demonstrate cloud skills and expertise. Organisations need developers to be highly productive while working on top of Cloud Foundry. Available online, Cloud Foundry Developer Certification and Training can be taken wherever there is demand in the world.

“The Cloud Foundry Certified Developer program will be a huge value to the community,” said Brian Gregory, Director of Cloud Strategy and Engineering for Express Scripts, a Fortune 100 healthcare company. “In our shift to Cloud Foundry, we've seen a massive uptick in productivity and business results. So much so, that the business continues to demand more from us, in the effort to make prescriptions safer and more affordable for our 3,000 clients and 85 million members. We can't hire developers fast enough -- we currently have a goal of hiring 1,000+ developers. Knowing a developer is Cloud Foundry Certified could streamline our hiring process and help ensure we're bringing on qualified candidates.”

“As Ford continues to use Cloud Foundry to support the demands of our business, finding software engineers with the right skills is a priority,” said Aaron Rajda, Director of MS&S Solution Delivery and FordLabs for Ford Motor Company. “Ford recognises certifications across a number of roles today and a Cloud Foundry Certification will be important in helping to identify and develop our software engineering team members.”

Certification is the best way to verify job candidates have practical experience with Cloud Foundry, across any distribution, including 2017 Certified Platforms: Huawei FusionStage, IBM Bluemix Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, SAP Cloud Platform and Swisscom Application Cloud. The training material can also be licensed, allowing Cloud Foundry Foundation members to offer the content through their own employee and customer training channels.

The 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 Cloud Foundry developer classes, offered by member companies including DellEMC, EngineerBetter, IBM, Pivotal, Resilient Scale, SAP, Stark and Wayne and Swisscom.
“Cloud Foundry Certified Developer” Certification, awarded to individuals who pass a performance-based exam.

The “Cloud Foundry Certified Developer” program follows a report issued by the Cloud Foundry Foundation in November 2016 that surveyed nearly 900 IT executives worldwide and revealed an escalating gap in cloud skills which threatens enterprises’ ability to embrace digital transformation. The survey found companies are doubling down on training internal engineering teams, rather than outsourcing engineering overseas or hiring new talent, to address the skills shortfall as digital becomes the modern business core competency. Cloud Foundry Developer Certification seeks to address these shortages with the preferred method of training while equipping developers with a lasting, marketable skill set.

“Companies need developers with the skills to build and manage cloud-native applications, and developers need jobs. We pinpointed this growing gap in the industry and recognised our opportunity to give both developers and enterprises what they need,” said Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “The Cloud Foundry Foundation is a nexus for collaboration and growth across industries with the open source mentality that everyone should win -- our members, end users, developers -- so it’s logical for us to drive a training and certification program that enriches the professional lives of developers and makes them valuable assets to companies who prize them for their own digital transformation.”

At launch of the new Cloud Foundry Developer Certification initiative, the training will be offered by more than a dozen leading technology, education and systems integration organisations around the world, including EngineerBetter, IBM, Pivotal, Resilient Scale, SAP, Stark and Wayne and Swisscom. The Linux Foundation, which has trained more than 800,000 students in over 215 countries on critical skills and certifications around Linux development, systems administration and OpenStack since 2003, will offer the online eLearning infrastructure for the Cloud Foundry Developer Certification initiative.

Developers can register for the free introductory course on edx.org in early May. The self-paced eLearning course “Cloud Foundry for Developers” will be available to the general public on June 13 for $500. The Certification exam takes up to four hours to complete and can be taken online for $300. The exam will also be offered in-person at the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley on June 13-15, 2017. Register for on-site certification when you sign up for Summit and receive a discount on your ticket: https://www.regonline.com/registration/Checkin.aspx?EventID=.... Discounts are available for bundled and bulk pricing purchases. To find detailed information on the suite of offerings, visit https://www.cloudfoundry.org/training/.

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

Quote Addendum

“As cloud computing transforms entire industries, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud platforms," said Don Boulia, GM of Cloud Developer Services at IBM. "Development teams are looking for flexibility and need an open platform like Cloud Foundry that can give developers the productivity they require. The industry needs more cloud developers trained and certified on a common cloud-native platform like Cloud Foundry. IBM is committed to open source and proud to continue our long tradition of supporting open tech communities.”

“As an industry, we have to do everything we can to help customers embrace their future through digital transformation,” said Björn Goerke, President SAP Cloud Platform at SAP. “At SAP, we see developers as the leaders of cloud-driven innovation and digital transformation, and we therefore support Cloud Foundry’s focus on expanding the universe of cloud developers.”

“At Dell EMC, multi-cloud innovation is at the heart of our business and developers are more important than ever,” said John Roese, Dell EMC CTO and Chairman of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. “We are increasing our investments in cloud-native solutions for our customers, and enabling our customer engineering teams to be more successful in their own cloud journeys. Certifying cloud developer expertise is a critical part in helping our industry grow.”

“As enterprises shift more workloads to public and private clouds, they need developers who can be successful in a new software engineering paradigm,” said Dave Ward, Senior Vice President, Chief Architect & CTO Engineering, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Board Member. “Cloud Foundry’s new initiative provides cloud-native developer expertise so engineers can ignore the complexities of the underlying infrastructure and focus on the business of creating new revenue-driving services faster.”

"Finding the right engineering talent is a challenge for enterprise organisations of all sizes, regardless of their cloud maturity,” said Paul Fazzone, Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Native Applications, VMware. “The Cloud Foundry Certified Developer program will empower organisations to advance their engineering talent pool by helping developers build their skills and expertise.”

“As the barrier between the worlds of the physical and digital disappear and industries transform, there is a growing need for cloud-native developers,” said Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal. “We support Cloud Foundry Foundation’s new initiative as it is designed to help everyone in our ecosystem address the growing developer gap in a way that builds on our own and others’ efforts to increase the pool of digital talent.”

“Cloud Foundry is a large and complex ecosystem, which can be intimidating to learn. We are very pleased that the Foundation has adopted the approach of context based, experiential learning to help onboard new developers,” said Steve Greenberg, Founder, Resilient Scale. “The course provides developers the opportunity to learn by doing while providing a solid foundation in cloud native concepts.”

“We're excited to be part of the first wave of folks delivering the Cloud Foundry Certified Developer training,” said Daniel Jones, CTO, EngineerBetter. “With help from our friends at Resilient Scale, we’ve combined contemporary learning science and practical experience to ensure that the hands-on nature of the course means that students come away with applicable skills backed by a strong mental model. We're confident that this is the next-best thing to pair-programming alongside a Cloud Foundry expert.”

ABOUT CLOUD FOUNDRY FOUNDATION
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard platform for cloud applications. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: http://www.cloudfoundry.org.

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