Ural Federal University: New DevOps Engineer Training Program Launched at the University
In September, a new training program for DevOps engineers was launched at Ural Federal University. These are specialists in continuous software development and administration. The training will use domestic products in the field of infrastructure solutions Basis, developed by Cloud Platform (the subdivision of Rostelecom, Yadro and Rubytech).
The training program for DevOps engineers at universities is implemented in order to provide Russia’s digital economy with highly qualified IT personnel in the most in-demand areas. The areas include automation of agile service development, creation and support of dynamic high-load cloud infrastructure.
Speaking about the importance of launching an educational program, David Martirosov, Vice President for IT Operations and Infrastructure at Rostelecom, noted that many companies are ready to take specialists from students, but there is no such specialists now, despite the high demand for them.
“In Russia, the demand for DevOps engineers is increasing manifold. Their professional skills are actively used in the banking, telecommunications, and IT industries, for example in companies such as Rostelecom, Beeline, MTS, VK, and Yandex, as well as in the public sector. For this reason our program of training such specialists is so important. This is the key to successful technological development of the country,” explained David Martirosov.
During the first year of the pilot program it is planned to train more than 1.6 thousand profile specialists on the basis of four universities. Taking into account the needs of business and the state in DevOps engineers in the next academic year it is planned to expand training within the pilot project from four to 12 universities. The total number of graduates of the program may reach 10 thousand people annually.
The first universities to begin training DevOps engineers will be Stankin University, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, MIREA Moscow State Technical University, and UrFU. The students will have an opportunity to enrich their knowledge within the framework of the federal state educational standards for technical training directions, among which are Informatics and Computer Engineering, Information Systems and Technologies, Applied Informatics and Software Engineering. The training program will also be available as an elective or additional education. Training in all forms of DevOps-engineers training is completely free for students, who are participants of the project.
The curricula are based on the latest developments and trends in software development methodology as well as cover new directions of DevOps culture development. Besides, programs are formed with participation of domestic software developers, leading IT engineers and highly qualified programmers with many years of experience in pedagogical practice. For the last two years the demand for such specialists grew by 70-80%. The demand for specialists able to work with Russian software grew by 200%.
In addition to university teaching specialists, lectures and seminars will be led by experts with at least four years of work experience in IT development. Training will be organized in a mixed format, including the use of Rostelecom’s public cloud resources, which will ensure the maximum involvement of students in the process of gaining knowledge.
“The students will have competencies in DevOps, automation of agile service development, creation and support of dynamic cloud infrastructure, and deployment of native virtualization tools,” said Victor Koksharov, rector of the Ural Federal University, about the details of the organization of the educational process.
As part of the course, instructors and students will use Basis.Digital Energy, a domestic ecosystem of software products that covers the entire spectrum of basic products for building and maintaining cloud infrastructure.