9 Cloud Skills IT Pros Need Now- Valutrics
Cloud computing is a huge part of IT, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down. As an IT professional, it makes sense to start looking into obtaining skills in different aspects of cloud technologies to further your career. Here, we’ve identified 9 of those skills.
Keep in mind, we’re not suggesting that all IT pros are going to be working for a service provider one day. In reality, most will end up on the customer end of the cloud relationship. While some of the skills we mention would only be useful for IT pros working inside a cloud provider shop, they are also useful in giving customers insight into how the cloud operates.
The areas of cloud computing we’ve identified are technologies that have the potential for high growth in the coming future. Certain spaces, such as big data and SDN, were originally projected to grow at a higher rate than they actually are.
Sometimes analysts underestimate the time needed to rework and redesign applications and infrastructures to include technologies that completely change how a network functions. But at the same time, that in no way means that these skills won’t be in high demand in the future.
Other areas of IT, such as hyperconvergence, seemed to come out of nowhere and have taken the cloud and data center market by storm. Understanding the benefits of hyperconvergence and other unified technologies is a quick way to bolster your resume in the cloud computing field.
Much as virtualization is a staple technology to understand in today’s cloud world, things like hyper-convergence, containers, and configuration management tools will be the standard skills to know in the not-so-distant future.
Cloud Security
Cloud security is a huge topic that covers a wide range of skills. But the bottom line is your goal should be to protect sensitive data as it rests in the cloud or as it moves between the cloud and those that need to access it. Specific skills include encryption, data loss prevention (DLP), data visibility, tools for identifying policy holes and shadow IT.
Network Overlays
From a cloud customer perspective, your aim is to make the cloud as seamless as possible to your end-user. From a cloud service provider perspective, you want to utilize your hardware so the separation of tenants, and the management of their applications and data, are as straightforward as possible.
Network overlays assist in achieving both of those needs by virtualizing the network components and logically decoupling them from hardware. Some specific skillsets involved in network overlay technologies include the understanding of how to design and implement network virtualization tunneling tools such as VXLAN, NVGRE, and STT.
Containers
Server virtualization is rapidly taking a backseat to containers for many cloud providers and cloud customers because of the many benefits they provide. VMs pale in comparison when it comes to server efficiencies. It takes half the number of virtual machines to run apps in a containerized cloud architecture than it would in a traditional VM environment.
Configuration Management Tools
Configuration management (CM) tools such as Puppet and Chef can be used to automate many parts of the cloud administration process. Not only do they allow administrators to roll out server environments more rapidly, they also provide a historical view of any configuration changes along the way. This dramatically reduces troubleshooting times and assists in meeting new system/application requirements when they change. The amount of productivity gained from CM tools makes it a skill that’s in high demand.
Big Data And Analytics
While big data hasn’t taken off quite as rapidly as some had predicted a few years ago, many companies are beginning to figure it out. In many cases, big data and the analytics of mining it is performed in the cloud. If you’re interested in the data management side of the house, look into topics surrounding Hadoop, Spark, and NoSQL. If you prefer analytics, look into Pentaho, HP Vertica, and IBM SPSS.
Cloud Monitoring And Visibility
Being able to identify and resolve parts of the application or infrastructure is what network performance monitoring (NPM) tools are all about. Issues such as network bottlenecks, underutilized VMs, or storage I/O issues can all be identified with NPM tools — provided you have the skills to use them.
Hyper-Convergence
One of the most popular new segments in the data center and cloud computing world is hyper-convergence. This is where you purchase a combined vendor solution that includes compute, network, and storage capabilities in a single box. The beautiful part is that the entire system is controlled using a single software defined management system.
Application Optimization
It used to be that network and data center administrators didn’t require a deep understanding of application traffic roles and resource dependencies beyond a rudimentary level. But because applications are becoming more sophisticated — and have to leverage the LAN and WAN in far more complex ways — admins that manage cloud applications and data require a deeper intelligence. By fully understanding how apps communicate, where they can falter, and how they recover, this knowledge can be used to optimize data center policies that ultimately make for more efficient applications.
White Box Switching
While white box switching hasn’t taken off quite as many expected it to a few years ago, it is beginning to make ground. White box switching is the ability to run switch operating systems — many of which are open source — on low cost, commodity hardware. Both SDN and IoT are beginning to push adoption of white box switching, which lets IT pros customize their networking OS in ways that closed-source vendors don’t allow.
Conclusion
This was just a sample of the virtually endless number of IT skills you can be adding to your portfolio in 2016. Keep in mind that the key in today’s market is to find areas within the cloud that are growing — or expected to grow — at a high rate. Ultimately, these areas are where the jobs will be — and will help to solidify your future employment.