The educational ecosystem for providing training in Linux, OpenStack and other open source software continues to grow. The latest momentum comes from Mirantis, which has announced a new milestone with more than 200 organizations now adopting the company’s training and certification program for OpenStack that launched in late 2013.

So far, those 200 organizations have enrolled more than 1,000 staff members in Mirarantis’s OpenStack training and certification program. MIrantis provides training through onsite OpenStack Bootcamp courses, and Kryterion runs certification exams (which candidates can take regardless of whether they have previously completed the OpenStack Bootcamp program).

Mirantis emphasizes the vendor-agnostic nature of its OpenStack training and certification, which assures IT professionals the skills to deploy and administer “OpenStack environments not tied to a particular OpenStack distribution,” the company said. “Professionals awarded the certification are able to configure an OpenStack environment that spans various host operating systems (RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS), virtualization technologies (KVM, vSphere), storage back-ends (Ceph, NetApp, EMC) and network topologies.”

Mirantis is not the only game in town when it comes to training for OpenStack and other open source platforms. Rackspace (RAX) has been offering a similar service through its Open Cloud Academy for more than a year. And just last week, the Linux Foundation and edX announced a partnership to deliver a Linux training course as a free MOOC. That endeavor is so far aimed only at introducing students to the Linux operating system, but it could help pioneer a new method of delivering training in open source software administration that could grow to cover OpenStack as well.

So far, different organizations are taking different paths to providing training in open source software. But the demand for open source expertise is consistently clear across the channel: As the open source cloud continues to grow, it requires a new army of IT professionals with skills in Linux, OpenStack and other open source cloud, virtualization, networking and operating system technologies. That army is forming now.