Training and Workshops

Institutions with deep knowledge of the skills needed for managing conventional HPC infrastructure can find the paradigms and tools of cloud a steep learning curve.

The skills gap is one of the greatest challenges facing research institutions making the journey to OpenStack private cloud.

StackHPC is here to help. We offer workshops for clients to build up the local skill set, capabilities and confidence in order to help teams tasked with OpenStack administration become effective and self-sustaining as quickly as possible.

OpenStack HIIT: A High-Intensity Workshop in Six Sessions

Six sessions of technical content developed for small groups (up to 6 participants), delivered as an online videoconference by one or more Senior Tech Leads from StackHPC. The workshop sessions enable a group to gain experience in areas such as:

  1. Step-by-step deployment of an OpenStack control plane into a virtualised lab environment.
  2. A deep dive into the control plane to understand how it fits together and how it works.
  3. Operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. Best practices for operating cloud infrastructure.
  4. Monitoring and logging for OpenStack infrastructure and workloads.
  5. Deploying platforms and applications to OpenStack infrastructure.
  6. OpenStack software-defined networking deep dive.
  7. Ceph storage and OpenStack.
  8. Contributing to a self-sustaining open source community.
  9. Deploying Kubernetes using OpenStack Magnum.

Six sessions can be chosen by the client to best meet their needs. The six sessions can be scheduled together, or spread apart, to allow for self-guided follow-up investigation.

The workshop lab sessions are performed in a hosted cloud environment. Using a client's own infrastructure is also possible, with provision of additional time for setup and qualification of client systems. This enables clients to easily recreate lab environments after the HIIT workshop has completed.

OpenStack HIIT

For further details see our HIIT workshop brochure

Bespoke Workshops: Developing Skills for Scientific OpenStack

Our bespoke workshops offer some unique advantages, described here.

  • Can be Delivered at a Customer Site: Rather than bringing team members to a different city or country, or delivering workshop content virtually in an online session, we offer to visit the customer site and deliver our workshop embedded in the customer environment. This enables attendees to take part where sessions are most useful to them, giving increased flexibility and convenience for the customer.
  • Content Specific for High-Performance OpenStack: StackHPC offers workshops focused on delivering high performance technologies in an OpenStack environment. The aim of the workshops is to help develop the skill set of the OpenStack team at a customer site, to enable them to introduce high performance capabilities into their OpenStack deployments.
  • Bespoke for Customer Needs: Rather than delivering a training course by rote from an inflexible syllabus, we aim to tailor our workshops to areas of our subject matter expertise that address specific needs for the customer. In this way we bring a more productive experience that is concentrated on customer success.
  • Working Together on Real Customer Problems: It's too easy for canned examples, delivered from a cloud-hosted test lab, not to translate into real-world customer environments. We ensure our workshops are relevant and full of concrete benefit by working in a customer's own development environment, using the same toolchains and methods.

Can We Help You?

If you would like to get in touch we would love to hear from you. Reach out to us via Twitter or directly via our contact page.

Go to archives