EUCA3 Certification Launch Delayed For Now

This is not the blog I wanted to write. I had hoped that today would be the day we would formally launch the EUCA3 certification exam. Most of the time we write blog posts trumpeting our successes or strategic advantages. Today I write to let you know of an unforeseen issue that - while seemingly minor from a company and product standpoint – has, for now, pushed back the EUCA3 certification launch.

Early last week it was discovered that while it is technically feasible to support two different hypervisor technologies in the same Eucalyptus cloud, it is not a configuration that has been QA’d and thus officially supported by Eucalyptus today.   The Product and Engineering teams within Eucalyptus are looking at this as Roadmap item for QA and release, but at this point there is no timeframe designated.    

From a practical customer standpoint, this has almost zero affect on any Eucalyptus clouds in production today. Every customer of which I am aware has intentionally chosen a single hypervisor as a way to simplify operations and support, and I believe that most future production deployments for customers will continue with a single hypervisor deployment. The product still supports multiple hypervisors (in different Eucalyptus clouds), and again it's even technically possible to run different hypervisor technologies in separate clusters in the same cloud. It's just not a supported configuration today.

As a result, we are in the process of quickly and thoroughly rewriting our Education and Consulting EucaStart courseware to reflect the new (to us) reality, and the next classes to run in February will have the correct information. Certification, however, is a different story. A large percentage of the Design questions that passed the beta process were based on what we now know to be incorrect information. Those questions have to be eliminated, and there simply aren't enough non-affected Design questions in the item bank that passed the beta to keep that section alive. Design was determined to be critical in vetting a cloud administrator, so the Design requirement cannot be dropped. Therefore, the entire Design portion of the EUCA3 exam has to be rewritten. Either that, or as a company we have to decide whether to QA and support this feature in a future release of our software. We should know by the end of Q1 2013 what the situation will be.

For those of you who passed the beta the first time around, you have nothing to worry about - you are EUCA3 certified, and will not be required to recertify until the next major product release (EUCA4 anyone?).  For those of you have been waiting for the exam, we are figuring out logistics now and will hopefully have more news for you soon. For Professional Services partners who have to be certified to meet "authorized partner" requirements, we are also in the process of figuring out how to deal with the delay and will be in communication with you shortly after the holiday break.

Apologies to you all, and I hope to have better news for you in the very near future.