DFWVMUG User Conference: Cloud Skills Gap

Closing the Cloud Skills Gap: Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe, blog.scottlowe.org)

Problem:

• 50% of business w/ cloud as high priority
• Insufficient candidates to fill openings
• Cloud brings new set of skills unneeded in past (Curtis Robinson, IDC)

NIST Definition of Cloud Computing

• On-demand self-service <– if you are doing something to allocate service, you aren’t doing cloud
• Resource pooling <– if no network virtualization, you aren’t doing cloud
• Rapid elasticity <– scale up AND scale down, often harder on the latter
• Measured service <– assess what’s being used
• Broad network access <– ubiquitous, access anywhere

Top Five Job Skills Needed (ranked by importance, from IDC whitepaper)

1. Risk management
2. IT service management
3. Project/program management
4. Business-IT alignment
5. Technical skills in cloud implementation <– note that this (tech) is last

Key Technical Skills

• Software development basics
  • No need to become a programmer
  • Do need to understand basics of DevOps, Vagrant, Git (or other version control system)
  • Do need to understand challenges software developers face
  • IT often puts the “no” in “inNOvation”
• Linux
  • Increasingly pervasive
  • Foundation of many cloud-related tech (VMware, storage, etc)
  • Inexpensive solution
  • Key things:
    • Pick a distribution (Ubuntu, RedHat/CentOS)
    • Put it to work & figure out common tasks (DHCP, DNS, etc)
• Automation & orchestration
  • Force multipliers (make each person more powerful than individually are manually)
  • Do more, faster, and in repeatably consistent fashion
  • Scripting languages: PowerShell, Perl, Python, Ruby
  • Config management tools: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible
  • Orchestration tools: vCenter Orchestrator, vCAC, OpenStack
  • No more “hand crafted” efforts!
• Public cloud services
  • Services include: vCloud Air, AWS, GCE, Azure
  • Remember: IT-business alignment is critical!
  • Know how these things works so you can align with business
• Bonus round (other things that are interesting & useful, to be addressed after the prior items)
  • NoSQL databases: CouchDB, Redis, mongoDB, Cassandra, Neo4j, membase, riak
  • Containers: Docker (super easy CLI and acts like version control)
  • Hadoop (in correlation with Cassandra, etc)
  • CloudVolumes, CloudFoundry, NSX…