Rackspace has unveiled a new global open cloud initiative, dubbed the Rackspace Training for OpenStack, to train and certify an "army of thousands of technicians, engineers and developers" on the fundamentals of OpenStack, the open source cloud platform it put in play.

Rackspace, the first company to commercialize OpenStack, has been beta testing a training course for the last year and has educated 300-350 people from about 50 mostly end-user companies in Australia, China, South Africa and the US so far, with Israel and Hong Kong scheduled soon.

Once they take a new Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack exam in December they'll be certified. Rackspace expects to move another 700-1,000 folks through the course this year.

The initiative is revenue-producing. The four-day course cost $2,500; a company can send 18 people for $45,000.

Rackspace intends to expand the course catalogue to include application development, clustering and business issues. There will also be courses on Rackspace-specific products.

Rackspace is in the process of lining up subcontractors to do the Rackspace-branded training and certification in foreign parts and foreign languages. Rackspace will own the translations. It is also expanding the number of instructors it has.

Most of people who have been trained are Linux sys admins with some knowledge of virtualization but no exposure to the cloud. Rackspace says "right now, a lot of people are using a DIY approach when it comes to learning how to use OpenStack, which can take weeks to figure out." The program is meant to accelerate the learning curve so they can fix problems.