So you are finally getting out of school or changing into an IT field. Everyone is talking about cloud. What should you be doing? Is your AWS certification enough or should you be learning a different cloud? Is your Computer Science diploma good enough? These are the common questions out there. As a leader in an IT corporation that deals with organizations across North America, I’d like to offer my advice and give you some information to get you started.
Let’s start with the basic and most common questions:
1) Should I focus on cloud only skills?
2) Which should I focus on AWS, Azure or Google?
3) What other technology should I focus on?
Let’s try to give you some insights based on some public information that’s out there today on a global view.
Flexera’s industry trends shows something that I’ve consistently see with the large IT organizations that I deal with. 90% of organizations are doing Hybrid cloud, which means they run their own infrastructure and run things in the cloud. So there is still a significant requirement for legacy systems, albeit, already the workforce trained in that space.
Another thing to be aware of is which cloud organizations use. One thing many people don’t know, is that they believe a company just runs one thing. In fact, most organizations run on average 3 clouds. Why do they do this? Most organizations – and as you get familiar with organizations is to increase uptime, security, and reduce risk. Most investors will tell you to not put all your eggs in once basket. This is to protect the organization and allow them to switch to another cloud quickly and easily if the cloud provider disappears, comes back with higher charges, etc.
More cloud adoption is being limited by the organization’s ability to have cloud expertise and execute in migration to the cloud projects. This includes converting the system (Changing from physical server to a portable image, like VM’s or Containers so it can be private/public cloud enabled), re-platforming or recoding the app (no way to convert and app must be re-written). This can give you an idea of the skillsets that organizations are seeking.
While cloud use is growing by 33% every quarter, which cloud is this growing in? ParkMyCloud’s blog is an awesome place that consolidated a lot of this info. We see AWS having about 33% of the cloud market share with Azure in the 20% range.
One bit of advice, don’t be fooled by these numbers – don’t jump on these stats blindly. We see that companies like Alibaba is 6%, but I’m pretty sure in Canada – that usage is almost nothing. Just remember that this stat is a bit misleading, it tabulates the total by the world, and might not reflect what your country is specifically doing.
Also, note that with what we see in hybrid, and cloud – know also of private cloud. Private cloud can also be a big contender. We see companies slowly moving out of Amazon back into the data centre, as they get big enough and the economies of scale and limitations of cloud providers don’t make sense anymore. Private cloud‘s are being lead by those like VMware, Microsoft, RedHat, etc. including technologies like Tanzu, Openstack, etc. However, that’s for another blog at a later time.
So with all this being said, what do you do? You get advice from Bill and Jeff, both smart people in IT. Bill says to learn Azure. It’s really hot, and that’s how he got his job. Joe is telling you to learn Alexa and Puppet integration, it offers humongous growth. They might all be right but it might not help you! The best thing to do is to reflect on your geography, the things that your company is actually doing. What got someone their job won’t get you yours.
How to start? Go on your local job opening websites for your region. Print out all the skill requirements for the jobs you want. Tabulate them all and get the most common/popular skills. Now, you have personalized info for you on what skills you need to learn. That’s how you learn what skills are sought after, you go to the source, get it from the horses mouth!
Sources:
https://www.flexera.com/blog/industry-trends/trend-of-cloud-computing-2020/
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/4-trends-impacting-cloud-adoption-in-2020/
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