Bitnami Bootcamp 2014

Earlier this summer, we announced the first Bitnami Cloud System Administration Bootcamp with the goal of sharing the know-how we have accumulated over the years at Bitnami to train the next generation of system administrators. Over the course of a few weeks, we received over a hundred applications, from which we invited 14 candidates to participate after an extensive selection process and one-on-one interviews.

Over a four week period that just wrapped up last week, we geeked out on Linux and the cloud. The mornings covered mostly theory (albeit with small interactive examples) while the afternoons were devoted to practical exercises. Each student managed their cloud servers using Bitnami Cloud Hosting (of course!) and we tracked and reviewed all assignments using a Bitnami-hosted Phabricator server. We started out learning about system internals, Git, bash scripting, networking and Unix build toolchains. We continued with the ins and outs of automating the deployment of apps written in a variety of languages and frameworks: PHP, Python, Java, Rails and Node.js. We invited guest speakers that covered in-depth a variety of topics, including Tomcat, OpenStack and configuration management tools. We explored the AWS, Azure and Google clouds, learning how to servers in each one of them both through the management console and their APIs/command line tools. We learned how to perform end to end deployment automation using Docker, Ansible and Bitnami tools. We ended with sessions on security and performance and built a project that brought together everything we covered in the course.

After the bootcamp, we invited six of the attendees to join the Bitnami team and they will start this Wednesday! We are excited to have these awesome engineers as part of the team and you can expect a significant increment in the number of apps we provide in the near future thanks to our expanded team.

We plan to repeat the experience early next year, expanding and improving the topics and materials. If this sounds interesting to you, consider applying and joining us next year in Seville!

Cloud System Administration Bootcamp 2015 early sign up