Like true cattlemen, Rancher Labs has rallied behind the DevOps community in an attempt to wrangle the Kubernetes skills gap with the launch of Rancher Academy, its new free training portal.  

Enterprises are under new pressure to adopt containers faster, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. Subsequently, Shannon Williams, co-founder and VP of sales at Rancher Labs, told SDxCentral that training demands have gone higher than ever before as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Williams rehashed details from a recent conversation with a friend who hosts “one of the top Udemy classes” for Kubernetes. “He was telling me that every day for the last three weeks have been like Black Friday,” Williams said.

Rancher Academy’s first course, the Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1, is designed for individuals who want to install Rancher Labs to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters. The online course is a digital adaptation of Rancher Labs Rodeo Program – its free in-person, hands-on training workshop. However, the Silicon Valley startup was apprehensive about the virtual move, according to Williams, who specifically cited concerns about duration, screen time, and overall effectiveness without personal connection. The program is designed to be completed over five weeks and includes four hours of video content, 87 units of instruction, quizzes, 37 hands-on labs, and a final assessment.

Rancher Labs Rodeo’s have always been regional and Rancher Academy will be no different. The decision to keep classes regional allows people from the same community to get together, which Williams said resulted in “dramatically more registrations from all over the globe.” 

“Kubernetes is going to be running 50% of an organization's applications within the next five years, " Williams explained. "You have to think about it strategically and that's what's so different about the Rancher Academy. It looks at it strategically, not just ‘how do I build a cluster?’ or ‘how do I deploy an application?’ It takes you through a journey of building a strategy as well as how to deliver Kubernetes-as-a-service in your organization."

Kubernetes had steamrolled the cloud market, however that growth has come with an increased focus on platform security. This feeds into what remains one of the biggest concerns for enterprises that want to drive Kubernetes deeper into their operations. Shoring up the security component is an important task for the Kubernetes ecosystem, but not the only one that continues to hinder broader deployments. While seemingly everyone wants to adopt Kubernetes, it remains a complex challenge for many.

Williams explained that the Rancher Academy curriculum is designed to teach students how to manage clusters from building operations and strategy for managing multiple clusters to security, network, and storage design, and systems integrations to different components within Kubernetes like Prometheus for monitoring, fluentD for logging, Istio for service mesh, and Open Policy Agent (OPA) for building security policies. Williams added that the last one has garnered the most interest.

Kubernetes as an enabler for distributed computing to push software out to devices, vehicles, or manufacturing plants on the edge has been another “big new use case,” according to Williams. He said the company has seen increased demand to put Kubernetes in the field as a better way to run mobile software and to manage it with the same set of capabilities offered in the cloud data center. 

Kubernetes and containers have become virtually synonymous with cloud-native development, driving job market demand over the last four years. Earlier this year data from job board Indeed found employer demand for IT professionals with Kubernetes experience to be growing faster than candidate interest. 

And that demand is mounting as organizations adopt cloud-native strategies and embrace Kubernetes. This is especially important given the current climate where enterprises that delayed digitization to the cloud are scrambling to reset and execute a full transformation in just a matter of days and weeks.

“People are so eager to move beyond Kubernetes the hard way, managing every cluster themselves – I think we're out of that stage with Kubernetes. People want services, they want to use Amazon's EKS or Google's GKE and they want to incorporate that into their own communities platform. And that's what Rancher does really well. The demand is coming for the training.”

Rancher Labs' efforts echos those of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which earlier this year launched its Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam, two years ago launched its Kubernetes for Developers course, and previously launched the Certified Kubernetes Administrator program. CNCF also offers developer training programs that link into those exam programs.

While uncertain times, Williams sees a clear and certain path forward that will undoubtedly usher in a pandemic of proprietary proportions.  He predicts that as the global economy worsens and companies tighten their purse strings, open source cloud adoption and digitization of services are going to accelerate dramatically.

“I’m a big believer that COVID is going to put a ton of gas behind the move to open source and a move to the cloud,” he said. “I think that our historical willingness to tie up with single vendors and lock into their platforms in the new normal, that's gotta go.”