The Cloud and the skill gap
Even if you haven’t worked in IT most probably you have heard about “The Cloud” — But what is this that is becoming more and more relevant every day?
The cloud is commonly referred as someone else’s server. But reality is that the cloud is a set of massive data centers operated by third parties (major players such as AWS, Microsoft and Google). Before the cloud, each company used to operate their own datacenter and run operations like power supply and air conditioning (powering and cooling hundreds of servers is a big deal), installing racks, hardware and running cables. Now, in ‘the cloud’, you don’t have to worry about it anymore, someone else does this for you.
Relevance of the cloud
Now, let’s talk about its relevance — The cloud started approximately 12 years ago with Amazon being one of the first players. For more than a decade, we have witnessed a huge boom in cloud services and new start-ups that are able to operate faster thanks to the cloud. But now, it’s becoming the new normal in Enterprises, SMBs and startups IT’s. Some statistics say[1]:
- Enterprises say that 92% of their IT environment relies on the cloud and its predicted to grow to 95% (date)
- Cloud Adoption has reached more than two-thirds in every industry — higher education (88%), manufacturing (87%), healthcare (86%) and financial services (75%)
- Covid-19 is not only changing economics, it’s accelerating changes in human behavior and consumer behaviour — Now, users are purchasing more online and interacting with others virtually — This has pushed an acceleration of the cloud business
Skill Gaps
This rapid growth needs to be backed by people that can architect, operate and secure the cloud. However, in a survey, 65% of CIOs reported that hiring challenges are hurting their company and their industry[2]. Additionally, another challenge present in moving to the public cloud is the lack of cloud security skills and expertise. Due to cloud investments, 67% of organizations are adding new roles and functions such as cloud architect, cloud systems administrators and security architect among others.
Just doing a quick search for cloud architects in London in LinkedIn jobs shows 2917 new jobs. So the question for many IT professionals is how to get started. To help you answer that question I will share my personal experience.
I joined AWS from Cisco. I was CCNA and CCNP in routing and switching and datacenter technologies, but my cloud knowledge was limited. At that point Cisco was selling UCS Director as their private cloud offering so that allowed me to learn about Private and Hybrid Cloud, but Public cloud is a completely different monster to tackle. I knew a lot about routing protocols like OSPF, EIGRP, BGP and others. I knew about physical servers (cores, memory, transceivers, NIC, GPUs, etc) and a little about VMWare hypervisor and OS(Linux and Windows Server). I also knew about hyperconvergence and storage (SAN, vSAN, NAS, SMB, etc). Still there was a lot more I needed to learn to be proficient on the cloud. However, the network, storage, OS and servers principles are the same in the cloud and on-prem. That gave me the confidence and the foundations to understand how VPC, EBS, EFS, EC2, etc worked.
I won’t lie, the first six months or more I had to study a lot. I got certified (Certifications fill our hearts) but you need more than a cert. I built my own architectures. I troubleshooted a CICD pipeline in CodePipeline for more than 2 weeks. It was very painful but I learnt. I had to deal with impostor syndrome (which I will cover in a future post). I felt like an ignorant in many conversations with peers and customers but every single second was worth it.
Now, if you come from a different background like software developer, database administrator, IBM Power administrator, Systems Engineer, or whatever, this still applies to you. Probably you will have to hone your skills about infrastructure or security or networking but your foundational knowledge will help you. Probably it will take you less time to troubleshoot a CICD pipeline than it took me but longer to understand VPC or Direct Connect. The main idea here is are you really willing to get out of comfort zone and spend many MANY hours learning and playing in the cloud? If the answer is yes, then, what you are waiting for?
Next post I will interview people that has moved from different backgrounds to the Cloud and what was the good, the bad and the ugly. So, stay tuned!
[Sources]
