Careers in Cloud Computing

Looking at the benefits that Cloud Computing provides, enterprises are keenly

observing and devising strategies on how to move forward in this domain. Be it

as a provider of services on the Cloud platform or as an enterprise to migrate

its applications to the cloud, most organizations have started venturing into

this domain. Whatever be the benefits and adoption rate, there shall be need for

new talent to help companies adopt to this latest technology. As can be seen

from past experience, a new technology brings in new career opportunities and

also makes old technologies redundant, you can expect the same from Cloud

Computing.

IT professionals over the years have experienced how technologies evolve

rapidly and realized the need to keep themselves in sync with the latest to

survive in their careers. It is no longer sufficient to know the difference

between Windows or Linux-based architecture. As the industry is becoming more

service oriented, IT professionals have to learn about the various ways in which

services can be delivered to customers. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has

already proved a good value proposition for enterprises, they just outsource

their application requirement to a third party to manage and provide them with

that service. And SaaS is just a pre-cursor to cloud computing. These days

companies already use some form of the Cloud architecture, like virtualization

or SaaS offerings. Therefore, it would just be a logical step for enterprises to

move towards the Cloud architecture.

Cloud Computing is hot!



The likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft have already initiated efforts in

Cloud Computing and are betting big on its success and eventual adoption. The

reason is evident from the benefits that an organization would accrue, like

reduced start-up costs and investments, scalability and ability to have flexible

and powerful computing platforms with no hassles of maintenance or licensing.

Cloud Computing in coming years is going to transform the IT infrastructure

space. It is a platform where service providers will deliver IT-enabled services

to consumers just like a SaaS-based platform, but with new benefits like

built-in elasticity and scalability. As of now, a SaaS-based service or

application is on a hosted setup, where each application has a defined IT

resource.

However, Cloud Computing is based on a more virtualized environment and there

is no resource constraint for an application. An application hosted on Cloud

platform should be able to harness the computing power of the resource with no

constraints, ie if the requirement of an application increases, the resource

allocated will also scale up dynamically. The elastic capability of Cloud

Computing as an offering to enterprises should be of much sense to them, as they

will have to pay for the resource that their application would be using, unlike

a SaaS delivery model where they had fixed subscription fees for the service.

Also, since more and more applications for organizational functions or processes

are becoming standardized and less customized, there are more possibilities for

larger enterprises to adopt and benefit from cloud computing.

Most organizations are now using Cloud as a hosting and deployment platform. But once people realize how their applications grow in usage and consumption, they can use the power of Cloud's elasticity and parallel computation. People will start moving their applications on to the Cloud to do that. IT professionals cannot ignore Cloud Computing, they should really consider how Cloud Computing can enhance the roles they are doing. Manish Rathi AVP - Services, GlobalLogic

Also, there shall be providers who will have the Cloud architecture-based

infrastructure for providing services and there will consumers, which shall be

organizations that will access services provided on the Cloud. Hence, there

would be two-faceted impact on career opportunities for IT professionals,

whether they are infrastructure engineers, software developers, networking or

security experts. The positive impact would be that there are opportunities for

them in organizations that plan to provide Cloud-based services. But the

negative impact would be for professionals in organizations that move towards

consuming Cloud-based services. Such organizations would focus on using economic

resources for addressing their business needs rather than maintaining

specialized personnel for running applications as they would use applications

hosted on the cloud, thus making some IT jobs in their organizations redundant.

Opportunities for IT pros



As previously discussed, Cloud Computing involves two types of

organizations. One the supply side are organizations such as Microsoft and

Amazon, that offer IT services on the Cloud platform. The other is the demand

side comprising of companies that consume such services. For the supply side,

i.e. the service providers, there will be several opportunities created in

different areas.

Software developers: In an IT product development company there will be need

to create applications that would adhere to the Cloud architecture. As these

applications shall be available as services and accessible through browsers,

software development skills such as SOAP, AJAX, Web Services, etc. would be

required to develop the applications for the Cloud platform. The difference

would be that during project development one will have to remove any constraints

that would not work on the cloud platform. According to true essence of cloud

architecture, any application should be able to run on the platform provided it

is properly architectured. Similarly, for professionals in the testing domain,

performance testing would have to be done on applications meant for the Cloud.

As Cloud provides elasticity and scalability features, they would have to

conduct testing wherein they'll have to check whether an application is meant

for 100 concurrent users and whether it can scale up automatically to cater to

10,000 users if there is sudden increase in traffic. Certainly, for the software

developers or testers, there will be plenty of opportunities for Cloud Computing

domain, provided they upgrade their knowledge by having proper understanding of

the Cloud framework pertaining to their domain. Those having understanding of a

content driven network, can leverage their skills on product development for

platforms like Amazon EC2 and Google AppEngine, that provide a platform as a

service for developing and hosting your application on their infrastructure. The

application would be using their environment for database, operating platform,

etc.

Infrastructure engineers: Professionals who are into IT infrastructure

creation and management like networking professionals, virtualization and

security experts can render their skills to enterprises who are setting up their

own Cloud Computing framework. Cloud is an evolution of the Services Oriented

Architecture. So, solution architects who are working with Service Oriented

Architecture (SOA) would be able to catch on with the Cloud Computing concept

very swiftly. Another area where Cloud Computing is creating an opportunity is

within Security and Data Storage.

Skills required



If you look at job postings from enterprises venturing in the Cloud Computing
domain, you will notice that there is a new profile created known as 'Cloud

Architect.' But looking at the skillset for the job, you'll come to know that

there's no rocket science involved for this profile, what is required are

professionals who understand enterprise networking, security and virtualization

aspects. Cloud platform is a new architecture, the underlying technologies for

its usage are already existing. Likewise, for software developers, .NET or Java,

the development requirements for building the application would remain the same,

the only change would be that they have to re-engineer their applications as per

Cloud's Architecture. This requires that both developers and the infrastructure

engineers increase their understanding of the Cloud platform. And when their

organization plans to have a Cloud Computing platform for their applications,

then their understanding of the Cloud architecture will prove to be invaluable

for the organization.

With the advent of cloud computing some of the low level IT jobs may get automated, there will be a need to manage more complex environments. For this, Cloud Computing Architects will be in high demand. Where there might have been a glass ceiling earlier in terms of technical growth, you will now see those open up. I would not be surprised if a similar technical ladder that is today prevalent in the software development side of things comes in place in IT as well. Deepak Visweswaraiah Sr. Director — SSG Group, EMC India COE

Security professionals will find a major place in the Cloud Computing

environment. The reason is that with Cloud Computing what you are doing is

taking away all your IT needs and giving it to a third party to manage, so here

companies become a little sensitive about their corporate data being hosted on

third party servers as there is lot of sensitivity about data. The recent

Dynamic Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks on some social networking sites like

Twitter and Facebook resulted in disruption of services for hours. If there is a

similar kind of an attack on a Cloud service provider's infrastructure, that

would result in disaster for those who are using their services. Therefore

security is a major concern and addressing these concerns would be a prime job

role for a security expert.

It is still early days for Cloud Computing and people are yet to understand the concept. It's really an evolution of whatever exists today, there isn't a formal curriculum out there. I think what you need to do is choose your stream between software development, software architecture, testing, security or infrastructure and learn the basics. The best way for this would be to pick this all while in job, because there isn't any formal training available in Cloud Computing per-se. Bhanu Chopra CEO, RateGain IT Solutions

There are multiple areas and disciplines in cloud computing. Virtualization

is the main theme that drives this technology. A good understanding and

expertise in virtualization, ability to consolidate server and storage

infrastructure, designing complex infrastructure environments, ability to handle

much higher scales of data can be summed up as some of the skills that would be

required in this domain.

Certifications



Having requisite certifications is one of the ways to convince prospective

employers about your efforts in a particular field. The hype around Cloud

Computing has been there for the last couple of years and whenever there is a

new technology, there are various organizations that start certification

courses. This is followed by professional institutes giving out certification

courses in that field. The same hasn't happened in the case of Cloud Computing

as it is still in a conceptual phase and organizations are using the Cloud

platform for hosting and deployment perspectives, which is the bare-minimal

usage of the real Cloud architecture. However, when adoption increases, we may

see a slew of institutes and organizations coming up with Cloud Computing

certifications. IBM has already taken initiative in this regard and started a

course on Cloud Computing.