In 2026, cloud and DevOps training is moving to offline classes and specialized tracks: a single multi-cloud DevOps course in Hyderabad offers over 80 hours of practice, and Red Hat has completely revamped its certification lineup. For engineers and businesses, this means an accelerated reshuffling of competencies and a growing demand for platform engineering expertise.

The new offline Multi-Cloud AWS + Azure DevOps program starts on May 18, 2026, in Hyderabad, while Red Hat simultaneously changes its entire certification system, introducing 5 specialized tracks and 5 levels. Against this backdrop, Google Cloud is expanding its Kubernetes course schedule, and platform engineering and AI agents are becoming the standard for cloud infrastructure. For companies in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, this is a clear signal: the window of opportunity to enhance cloud competencies is limited to the next 12-18 months, as the market redistributes roles and salaries. Companies like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) are already building multi-cloud teams and raising certification requirements for contractors.

Multi-Cloud AWS and Azure DevOps: Offline Training is Back

Cloudsoft Solutions announced the launch of a new offline Multi-Cloud AWS + Azure DevOps training program in the Ameerpet area of Hyderabad, starting on May 18, 2026, at 11:00 AM local time. The program is designed for 3-4 months of daily weekday sessions and includes over 80 hours of practical lab work. The course focuses not only on AWS and Azure but also on the full stack of modern DevOps: Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and certification preparation. Importantly, the course is practice-oriented rather than purely theoretical: capstone projects and structured job placement support are promised.

The fact that the provider is betting on the classic offline format in 2026 is indicative. After several years of dominance by fully online training, major centers in India have begun to bring back classrooms to increase discipline, depth of immersion, and networking levels. For DevOps and platform engineers, this is critical: real debugging of CI/CD, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure as code requires intensive work with a mentor and live discussion of typical incidents. A 16-week course with 80+ hours of labs provides a total of about 5-6 hours of practice per week on top of regular employment.

The focus on multi-cloud rather than a single vendor is also noteworthy. The program is built around working with AWS and Azure simultaneously, reflecting the real market situation: large companies use two or more providers to reduce risk and optimize costs across regions. For engineers, this means that specializing in a single platform is gradually becoming a career growth limitation. Companies like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz), working with clients from different countries and industries, increasingly require DevOps engineers to have experience in at least two ecosystems plus a solid grasp of Kubernetes.

Demand for such programs is confirmed by another factor: seats in the program, according to Cloudsoft Solutions, are limited and booked via WhatsApp and phone, with a separate free demo session advertised. This is a typical model for a hot market: training centers cut down on random registrations and quickly assemble groups of motivated professionals. For IT contractors from Kazakhstan and Central Asia, this is a signal: if internal training and partnerships with external centers are not established, the gap between the expectations of global clients and the current competencies of local teams will widen in 1-2 years.

Red Hat Changes the Game: New Certification Lineup 2026

In May 2026, Red Hat announced a complete overhaul of its certification program, introducing 5 specialized tracks and 5 progressive levels of complexity. According to the official announcement, the company did not just rename existing certificates but completely reassembled the competency map around Kubernetes, platform engineering, automation, and security. This is the first systemic update in several years for one of the most influential programs in the world of enterprise Linux and containers.

The new tracks are now structured by roles: system administration, DevOps and automation, cloud infrastructure, security, and platform engineering and SRE. Each track is divided into 5 levels, from basic to expert, which resembles the model of many vendors but with a stronger emphasis on hands-on practical exams. To pass the levels, dozens of hours of lab work with Kubernetes, OpenShift, Ansible, and other tools are required. This means that simply "cramming" exam questions will no longer suffice: real skills in building and debugging clusters and pipelines are necessary.

Why is this important now? Over the past two years, Kubernetes and platform engineering have essentially become the new standard for corporate infrastructure. According to several major cloud providers, the share of containerized workloads in total computing resources already exceeds 30-40 percent for companies actively migrating to the cloud. By reorienting its certification, Red Hat is fixing this trend at the vendor requirements level. For integrators and outsourcers, this becomes a direct KPI: more and more tenders include the mandatory presence of specialists with current Red Hat certificates.

Companies like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) are already incorporating the updated Red Hat certification tracks into their employee development plans. Practice shows that engineers with proven competency in Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift pass security and architectural audits for corporate clients more quickly. At the same time, this affects salary ranges: on the global market, the premium for having an up-to-date Red Hat status for DevOps and platform engineers often reaches 15-25 percent relative to similar roles without certification. In Central Asian countries, this gap is currently lower, but with the growth of export projects and the arrival of international clients, it will increase.

Google Cloud and Kubernetes: Strengthening Classic Courses

Google Cloud continues to strengthen its educational block around Kubernetes, maintaining a focus on the flagship Architecting with Google Kubernetes Engine course. The training schedule for May 2026 already includes at least one stream of this course in a virtual classroom format in English. The standard duration of the program is 2 days, with training conducted by partners such as NetCom Learning and aimed at architects and engineers who design GKE clusters for production workloads.

As part of the course, engineers explore architectural patterns for microservices, the basics of working with Pod, Deployment, Service, and Ingress, as well as integration with network infrastructure and security systems in Google Cloud. Separate attention is paid to observability: logging, metrics, tracing, and integration with monitoring tools. Despite the compact format of a 2-day training, the program is packed with cases on cost and performance optimization, which is important for companies migrating dozens and hundreds of services to Kubernetes.

Interestingly, Google maintains the priority of GKE as the main platform for training, although multi-cloud is becoming the norm for large companies. This is explained by the fact that Kubernetes remains the "language" of infrastructure, and the specific provider largely turns into a transport layer. For engineers, this approach is convenient: having mastered Kubernetes in the context of GKE, they can transfer their skills to clusters on other platforms with minimal changes. The training program emphasizes portability of applications and working with Helm, which reduces the cost of migrations between clouds.

For contractors involved in the development and maintenance of cloud infrastructure, including Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz), having engineers with GKE experience and a deep understanding of Kubernetes becomes an additional competitive advantage in tenders where clients choose a "cloud-agnostic" strategy. In the face of growing competition between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, companies increasingly want to avoid strict binding to a single provider and require contractors to be able to maintain clusters on different platforms. This directly increases the demand for short but intensive courses on Kubernetes and GKE.

Platform Engineering and AI Agents: A New Layer of Cloud Infrastructure

In 2026, an important trend is developing: platform engineering is being combined with AI agents, simplifying the management of complex cloud infrastructure. According to the Pulumi blog, a significant portion of the "middle layer" of abstractions that used to be written manually is disappearing due to the integration of SDKs for AI agents and the expansion of built-in tools. For example, the Claude Agent SDK already comes with a set of built-in utilities for working with files, shell commands, and web access, and specialized plugins are connected via MCP servers. At the same time, in 2025-2026, the number of such servers, according to Pulumi, has grown almost 8 times.

This means that part of the typical tasks of platform engineering — generating infrastructure as code, setting up CI/CD pipelines, creating security checks — is gradually being delegated to AI agents working on top of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes clusters. Platform teams are focusing more on defining standards, guardrails, and policies rather than manually writing scripts. For businesses, this provides two effects: accelerated delivery of changes (time-to-market is reduced by weeks) and reduced operational risks due to more uniform infrastructure.

However, this should not be perceived as a replacement for engineering teams. To build a reliable platform with AI agents, companies need specialists who understand the architecture of cloud services, security, the model of access rights, and the limitations of the infrastructure description languages used. An AI agent can generate a Terraform module, but the platform engineer is responsible for ensuring it meets corporate requirements. Therefore, the demand is shifting towards more mature specialists who can design and verify systems rather than just write code.

Companies like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) are already experimenting with using AI agents in the DevOps and SRE context: from automating changes in Kubernetes manifests to semi-automatic analysis of incident postmortems. In practice, this leads to a revision of hiring profiles: there is a growing need for engineers who are comfortable in clouds, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and can work with AI tools. For the Central Asian market, this is an opportunity to make a leap, bypassing some of the intermediate stages of development and immediately building more "smart" platform teams.

Why Companies are Accelerating Cloud Transformation Right Now

Cloud transformation materials, such as detailed case interview guides from consulting platforms, confirm that large companies view the cloud not as a trendy topic but as a tool for managing total cost of ownership (TCO) and execution risks. The classic "7 R" scheme for cloud migration — rehost, replatform, refactor, and so on — in 2026 is supplemented by discussions of multi-cloud, automation level, and platform engineering maturity. At the same time, key solutions are becoming the choice between building your own platform, purchasing ready-made SaaS, and a combined approach.

For businesses, this means the need to have teams that can calculate TCO for different models: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. For example, comparing bare virtual machines (IaaS) with fully managed Kubernetes platforms shows that expenses can differ by tens of percent in both directions, depending on container density, reservation model, and availability requirements. Industry cases often feature savings of 20-30 percent when transitioning from a monolith to a managed Kubernetes with the right automation.

Today's news about the launch of new multi-cloud DevOps training programs, the update of Red Hat certifications, and the expansion of Kubernetes training at Google Cloud should be viewed through this lens. The market is preparing for a new wave of cloud projects, where engineers are expected not just to "use the cloud" but to be able to argue between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, plan migrations, and assess risks. HR interviews and case interviews increasingly include tasks on TCO analysis, migration modeling, and infrastructure as code template design.

For outsourcing companies, including Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz), this means that employee training and certification are no longer an "option" but a condition for access to large contracts. Clients from the financial sector, e-commerce, and logistics increasingly request portfolios of implemented cloud transformations and confirmation of engineer competencies through vendor certifications. The window of opportunity for those who manage to prepare teams and build multi-cloud expertise is estimated at 1.5-2 years before the market becomes saturated with the next generation of specialists.

Что это значит для Казахстана

For Kazakhstan and Central Asian countries, the current news on clouds and DevOps has direct practical significance. According to local analysts and open data, the volume of the ICT market in Kazakhstan has already exceeded 1 trillion tenge, with the share of cloud services and outsourcing growing at double-digit rates annually. At the same time, competition for international projects is intensifying: large clients from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia require contractors to have multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and mature Kubernetes practices.

Against this backdrop, the launch of new multi-cloud DevOps courses and the update of Red Hat certifications create an opportunity for regional companies. Players like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) can use these programs for accelerated engineer training: sending employees to foreign courses, building internal academies, and preparing specialists for new Red Hat tracks. This allows them to bid for contracts where the presence of a team with proven competency in Kubernetes, platform engineering, and automation is a mandatory condition.

For corporate IT services in Kazakhstan, the practical benefit is different: a competent cloud transformation based on a multi-cloud architecture and Kubernetes can reduce infrastructure TCO by 20-30 percent over a 3-5 year horizon. But for this, teams are needed that have not only been trained but can also apply their knowledge in real projects. The emergence of new global training programs and certification updates in 2026 helps regional players quickly bring their competencies up to the international level without waiting for local analogs to appear.

In May 2026, Red Hat completely updated its certification program, introducing 5 specialized tracks and 5 levels focused on Kubernetes, automation, and platform engineering.

The cloud and DevOps market in 2026 is entering a phase of accelerated professionalization: multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and platform engineering are becoming mandatory standards rather than competitive advantages. New training programs and updated certifications set the bar for engineers and companies that want to work with international clients. For businesses in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, it is critical to use this moment to build competencies through partnerships and internal academies. Those who manage to integrate multi-cloud stacks and AI agents into their platforms will gain an advantage in the coming years in terms of product delivery speed and infrastructure cost.

Часто задаваемые вопросы

What is multi-cloud DevOps and why is it needed for business?

Multi-cloud DevOps is an approach where infrastructure and CI/CD processes are built on top of multiple cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. For businesses, this reduces the risk of dependency on a single provider and allows for cost optimization of resources across regions and tariffs, often by 10-20 percent. This approach is especially beneficial for companies with an international client base and strict availability requirements. Implementing multi-cloud is easier through infrastructure as code (Terraform) and Kubernetes, which make the architecture more portable.

How does the new Red Hat certification 2026 differ from the old one?

In 2026, Red Hat moved from a set of disparate exams to a structure of 5 specialized tracks and 5 levels of complexity in each. Previously, certificates often covered individual products, but now the focus is on roles: administrator, DevOps, cloud architect, security specialist, and platform engineer. Exams have become even more practical: the basis is hands-on tasks on Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Ansible, completed within a limited time. For an engineer, this means that without real combat experience, passing the full track will be significantly more difficult, but the value of such a certificate in the market is higher.

What are the risks and complexities of transitioning to Kubernetes and multi-cloud?

The main risks are related to increased complexity: managing dozens of microservices in Kubernetes requires mature observability, a well-thought-out network, and security. Incorrect cluster design can increase, rather than decrease, infrastructure costs by 20-30 percent due to oversized resources and duplicated environments. Transitioning to multi-cloud adds another layer of complexity: policies, IAM, and deployment processes need to be synchronized between providers. To mitigate risks, companies engage experienced partners like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) and start with pilot projects on individual products rather than transitioning the entire system at once.

How long does it take to prepare an engineer to the cloud/DevOps middle level?

With intensive training and regular practice, the path to a confident cloud/DevOps middle level usually takes 12-18 months. Programs like the offline Multi-Cloud AWS + Azure DevOps course provide 80+ hours of practice over 3-4 months, but this is only a starting base. Real projects are needed next: participation in 2-3 CI/CD implementations, setting up several Kubernetes clusters, and automating infrastructure as code. Companies like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) often plan a 1.5-year roadmap for juniors with a phased increase in the area of responsibility and subsequent preparation for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Red Hat certification.

What cloud and DevOps stack is currently optimal for business?

The optimal stack for most companies includes one primary cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) plus occasional use of a second one for redundancy or specific services. Kubernetes is usually chosen as the basic infrastructure level for containers, Terraform for resource description, and one of the common CI/CD tools, such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions. For observability, the Prometheus + Grafana stack and centralized logging are used, allowing for SLA monitoring and quick incident response. A partner like Alashed IT (it.alashed.kz) can help select a combination of services to achieve a 15-25 percent TCO savings compared to chaotic cloud resource procurement.

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