Cloud Foundry launches its developer certification program

Cloud Foundry, a massive open source project that allows enterprises to host their own platform-as-a-service for running cloud applications in their own data center or in a public cloud, today announced the launch of its “Cloud Foundry Certified Developer” program.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation calls this “the world’s largest cloud-native developer certification initiative,” and while we obviously still have to wait and see how successful this initiative will be, it already has the backing of the likes of Dell EMC, IBM, SAP and Pivotal (the commercial venture that incubated the Cloud Foundry project). The company is partnering with the Linux Foundation to deliver the program through its eLearning infrastructure.

The idea here is to allow both experienced and novice developers demonstrate their open source cloud skills. The program will focus on all of the major public cloud platforms that currently offer Cloud Foundry support, including those from Huawei, IBM, Pivotal, SAP and Swisscom.

The $300 exam itself, which should take about four hours to finish, will cover the Cloud Foundry basics, cloud-native application security, application management and container management, and will test developers on their ability to modify simple Java, Node.js and Ruby applications. While this represents a pretty wide swath of topics, developers who can show competency in all of these areas surely won’t have an issue finding a job quickly.

“Companies need developers with the skills to build and manage cloud-native applications, and developers need jobs,” Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers notes in today’s announcement. “We pinpointed this growing gap in the industry and recognized our opportunity to give both developers and enterprises what they need.”

The launch of this program doesn’t necessarily come as a major surprise. Childers already told us this was in the works last November.

The program is currently in its beta phase and will become generally available on June 13 (not coincidentally, that’s also the first day of the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley and developers will be able to take the test in person at the event).