Cloud Jobs

Cloud is the current buzz in the industry and various cloud service-providers are jockeying for position to be #1. Beyond the hype and bravado I've been wondering who is really taking the lead because from my point of view it feels like it's down to Amazon and Google.

So I searched a few job-sites to see which cloud service providers are seen as being requirements for positions and the results are below.



 

Lots of "Cloud" jobs and AWS (Amazon Web Services) occurs quite frequently with Azure (Microsoft) and Rackspace relatively hot (compared to OpenShift, Softlayer and Oracle Cloud). Google App Engine (GAE) gets a few hits whilst the general search for "Google" (which covers "Google Apps" and so much more) if included would bring the search results into a comparable position to AWS but this is too general to include as "Cloud" so I've excluded it here. Google Compute Engine got no hits.

So Cloud is big, Amazon are #1 (currently) and Azure is pretty popular; which shouldn't be much of a surprise from the enterprise perspective. That OpenStack has a presence compared to end service-providers such as SoftLayer (IBM) and OpenShift (RedHat) indicates that there's work in the open-source cloud space which is good to see (AFAIC) and some of this looks to be in building private clouds. But the lack of any hits for Softlayer, OpenShift or Oracle Cloud is a bit of a surprise. I'd have thought someone would be after skills in this stuff. Anyway, my somewhat unscientific reckoning as to where we are based on a very small and selective sample of data is:

1. The notion that "Amazon=Cloud" is hard to shift and the rest look to be rather slow to the party.


2. Microsoft Azure is the preferred option for many enterprises who have a historic investment in all things MS and .NET.


3. Google may be late to the IaaS party but since the net is the bloodline for Google I suspect that in the wider context of "cloud" they'll probably do ok (they've also got a hell of a lot of compute capacity lying around).


4. Open-source cloud has a comparatively strong position compared to where OSS usually is (i.e. as the lowest cost option when you get down to IT as a commodity).


5. There's a lot of demand for cloud which doesn't have any of these big cloud service providers as a requirement so the space for competition should be pretty hot despite this apparent Amazon/Microsoft duopoly.

Ok, it's hardly scientific and the scope of these service providers varies significantly so comparison is perhaps unfair. There's also the fact that some search results are of the form "... help us move from X to Y" which yields hits on both X as well as Y and though skills are required in both items it's really Y that should be preferred. It's also a very narrow selection of jobs in Britian today and says nothing about the rest of the world or what's already in use. Anyway, for this evening it's answered my question and I'll be reading up on my AWS, Azure and OpenStack to keep my skills current this weekend... :)

For the record, job sites searched were; jobserve.com, monster.co.uk, and totaljobs.com.