Meet Your OpenStack Training Instructor: Reza Roodsari
Next up in our “Meet your OpenStack Training Instructor” series, we spend a few moments talking with Reza Roodsari.
Tell us more about your background. How did you become involved in OpenStack training?
Just like the satisfaction a person receives after they put together a good puzzle, I have always had passion for working with complex, intricate systems.
For me, the cloud is a perfect extension of this passion - and playing in the OpenStack playground, with its ever-evolving conglomeration of open-source components, is just as intriguing as a Mandelbrot. Just like a Mandelbrot, an OpenStack environment is a grand, captivating, and immense landscape.
It is a place where one is never bored.
What do you enjoy most about training?
Any successful teacher must possess the innate ability to step back, structure and articulate information in a manner that transfers knowledge and facilitates learning. For me this has always been one of teaching’s biggest rewards. I truly enjoy the challenge of discovering new ways to take difficult subjects, and present them in an easy to understand, efficient manner.
Of course, as is the case with any discipline or domain, intuitive understanding comes with a commitment to continued practice and education. For me, this has always been an added benefit that comes from my passion for teaching. It allows me to approach a subject from a deeply personal level, and it opens up the opportunity to gain an intuitive understanding.
What do you find the biggest challenge in training students to use OpenStack?
Simply put: A good teacher makes complex topics easy to understand. A struggling teacher makes an easy subject difficult to understand.
In terms of OpenStack training, and its ever-evolving collection of moving parts, the challenge becomes remaining committed to approaching a complex subject, and presenting it in an easy to understand manner.
Here at Mirantis Training, our promise and our challenge has always been to ensure that every student walks away with a deep understanding of OpenStack. Our mission is to deliver the knowledge, skillset and tools they need to tackle the challenge of a real-world OpenStack environment.
What kinds of professionals are most likely to benefit from participating in this class?
In our introductory course, we cover all the fundamentals you need to know before you dive into architecting and deploying a cloud based OpenStack environment. While our classes are structured to prepare students from an array of different backgrounds and skillsets, networking professionals and IT engineers comprise a high percentage of our classes.
What advice would you give our readers who want to learn more about OpenStack?
It all begins with time and commitment to learning. Everything we teach at Mirantis, you can learn on your own, but you need to be prepared to invest the time and effort - and I would start with http://www.openstack.org/software/start/.
Of course, the advantage of an OpenStack training course from Mirantis is that this learning curve is reduced dramatically. I encourage any IT professional committed to expanding their understanding of OpenStack to seriously consider attending one of our trainings.
