Building a cloud career with OpenStack

A collection of articles about jobs and careers in open source.

What can OpenStack do for you? How about helping you along your career? OpenStack is a growing space and there are more than enough jobs still to go around for qualified seekers. So how do you go about getting one of those jobs?

In this video from the Kilo OpenStack Summit in Paris, Niki Acosta, Ryan Yard, Shamail Tahir, Kenneth Hui, Eric Wright, and Aaron Delp offer their perspectives on a variety of topics around creating and building a career in cloud software through the OpenStack community.

In some ways, OpenStack isn't that different than any other open source project. There is a well-formed community behind OpenStack which can help to guide you in the right direction, and many resources for beginners to get started. But learning to navigate the community, the documentation, the many third party tutorials and videos and other learning resources can be a challenge. Sometimes too much information can make it hard to decide where to start when you're just beginner to get involved with a project.

To help unlock the secrets of a cloud career, the panelist address a number of questions which might be of use to someone looking to start or transition to a career in cloud:

• How do people get involved in OpenStack?
• What kinds of resourceful things can help you stand out from the crowd?
• How do you traverse the path through cloud software, and of all of the many things you could need to know, which are most important to learn?
• How do you find a specialization within a project as large and diverse as OpenStack?
• How is the OpenStack ecosystem growing, and what areas hold the jobs?
• If you're not a coder, how do you map the strengths you have to the needs within the OpenStack community?
• What are the differences between working at a large OpenStack company and a smaller startup?
• How do you figure out what the "next big thing" is going to be, and start learning about it to get ahead of the game?

This talk was an update from a similar panel at the previous Atlanta OpenStack Summit, which we have previously profiled, though the last video was worth watching as well. As for this session, at about 40 minutes, the video is easy to watch and well worth your time. Check it out!

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