Rackspace is stepping up its cloud war against Amazon with the opening of Open Cloud Academy. The San Antonio-based school is located near the Rackspace headquarters and will offer a certification program that will transform a student into a "top entry-level open cloud technologist."
Although Amazon Web Services is still the leader when it comes to cloud-based computing, Rackspace's bold new approach hopes to reinvent the landscape by transcending simple marketing — aiming instead to train the next generation of cloud engineers.
There's a real industry need for this, says Rackspace chairman Graham Weston. Whether or not Open Cloud Academy graduates wind up working for Rackspace's OpenStack cloud service, somebody needs to train tomorrow's engineers.
"The skills needed to build websites, like HTML and PHP [computer languages used in web development] are pretty mature," Weston told Fortune. "But the new skills are running those apps on a cloud-based server infrastructure — you just can't go to college to learn those languages."
"There are an awful lot of people in IT shops that are highly skilled, but they need to close the gap of how to become marketable in the cloud world today," he added.
Open Cloud Academy's inaugural class didn't pay any tuition, but future graduates will pay $3,500 for the course. Rackspace says it will also offer online programs for $200, plus a fee of $20 per month.
Anyone can apply right now on the Open Cloud Academy website, but Weston said Rackspace would at first focus mainly on enrolling recent college graduates, as well as military veterans.
