LOS ANGELES – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) launched its Kubernetes Certified Service Providers (KCSP) program today at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit. A half-dozen names made the inaugural list of companies deemed certification-worthy of helping enterprises adopt Kubernetes as a container orchestrator.

Founding members of the program include Accenture, Booze Allen Hamilton, Canonical, CoreOS, Giant Swarm, and Samsung SDS.

CNCF vetted the companies on the list to offer Kubernetes support, consulting, professional services, and training for organizations looking to deploy the container orchestration platform.

Specifically, companies that qualify for the program require at least three engineers to pass the also newly launched Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam. The online exam tests the ability to solve issues in a command-line environment. The exam is also being offered to individuals for $300.

KCSP recognition also requires activity in the Kubernetes community, including active contributions, as well as a business model that allows for on-site deployment of qualified engineers.

“As Kubernetes has grown, so has the demand from enterprises needing expert services and support,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of CNCF, in a statement. “Enterprises working with KCSPs can be confident the partner they’ve chosen to work with has the training and skills needed to help them succeed with Kubernetes.”

CNCF currently hosts 10 projects, including Kubernetes for container orchestration; Prometheus for monitoring; Open Tracing for application flow monitoring; Fluentd for logging; Linkerd for service mesh; gRPC for remote procedure calls; CoreDNS for service discovery; Containerd and Rkt for container runtimes; and CNI for container native networking.

The rapid growth of Kubernetes has placed a strain on technical skills needed to support deployment.

CNCF cited a Capgemini survey of 900 executives that found 70 percent of respondents claimed skills shortages as a challenge in their organization’s cloud-native plans.

Rancher Labs, in a recent report comparing Kubernetes with the Docker Swarm container orchestrator, cited a steeper learning curve for the former.

“Using Kubernetes requires that users master new concepts and learn a new CLI [command line interface] that while quite rich is different than the Docker CLI,” explained Rancher Labs. “Kubernetes does provide advanced features however that for seasoned administrators can actually make the environment easier to manage.”

Jay Lyman, principal analyst for cloud management and containers at 451 Research, said his firm’s research showed “a skills gaps in terms of DevOps and containers for the enterprise.” He noted 57 percent of organizations said they lacked internal cloud skills, with 27 percent of enterprises seeing a significant need for Kubernetes training over the next two years.

In a recent survey conducted by SDxCentral, 55 percent of respondents that are not currently using container technology said a “lack of maturity” was the main reason for their reluctance. Twenty-seven percent noted a “lack of management and deployment tools” were holding them back, while 24 percent said they “don’t know how to scale containers yet.”

“It’s one thing to adopt containers,” Lyman said. “But, most are not looking into the 10,000 containers that Google is looking to do. Enterprises are not quite ready to dive into that cold pool.”