The Linux Foundation and edX Announce New, Free DevOps Course

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to provide students an understanding of DevOps, including tools and workflow, to enable better career and business decision making

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – October 26, 2016 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced its newest massive open online course (MOOC) is available for registration. The course, LFS161x – Introduction to DevOps: Transforming and Improving Operations, is offered through edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The course is free and will begin November 16.

Registration is now open for this free course.

This is the fourth edX MOOC offered by The Linux Foundation. Its first course, Intro to Linux, has reached more than 600,000 students globally and continues to grow in registrations. The others are Intro to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies and Introduction to OpenStack.

“DevOps is a rapidly growing career field, which provides strong job security, highly competitive compensation and opportunities for growth, but there is a lack of experience and talent in the market that need to be remedied,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “From our past experience, we knew edX was the best partner to help address this lack of talent by providing a platform to make DevOps education easily accessible.”

DevOps started as a cultural movement, designed to remove silos between developers and operations personnel. It originated with operations personnel who felt they would be more effective managing IT infrastructure if they better understood how and why it was built. Organizations that implement DevOps best practices have been demonstrated to be more agile, flexible and effective in designing and implementing IT practices and tools, resulting in higher revenue generation at a lower cost. The Linux Foundation is already helping develop technology for DevOps professionals through its open source projects, and now through the launch of this course, to provide the training opportunities to educate a talent pool to support those projects.

LFS161x is organized around the three basic principles of DevOps, otherwise known as the “Three Ways”, which outline the values and philosophies that guide DevOps processes and practices. Students will learn how to:

• Explain the need to do DevOps.

• Understand the DevOps foundations, principles, and practices.

• Understand, analyze, and map value streams.

• Explain and implement the deployment pipeline.

• Illustrate the concept of Continuous Delivery.

• Create a problem solving culture.

• Explain the concepts of blameless postmortems.

• Monitor meaningful infrastructure and business metrics.

• Converge change management and DevOps.

• Understand how resilience engineering and safety culture are critical to DevOps success.

• Create a learning organization.

The course instructor, John Willis, has over 35 years of experience, focusing on IT infrastructure and operations.  He has helped early startups such as Chef, Enstratius (now Dell) and Docker navigate the DevOps movement, and is one of the original core organizers of this movement. Willis has been a prominent keynote speaker at various DevOps events throughout the years, and is a co-author of the “DevOps Handbook”.

“DevOps is a new and rapidly growing field that shows immense promise,” said edX CEO and MIT Professor Anant Agarwal. “This course furthers the professionalization of the industry, and we are proud to continue our work with The Linux Foundation to expand edX’s technical and open source educational offerings.”

The course includes six chapters, each with a short graded quiz at the end. A final exam is also required in order to complete the course. Students may take the complete course at no cost, or add a verified certificate of completion for $99.

For more information The Linux Foundation’s training and certification programs, please visit: http://training.linuxfoundation.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

# # #

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.