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)
- Risk management
- IT service management
- Project/program management
- Business-IT alignment
- 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…
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