Life After Amazon Web Services

(Update) We’ve recently updated AWS Learning Paths to prepare for AWS certifications, please visit the AWS Learning Path library page to start preparing for the certification of your choice. On top of that, we’ve also released some great new content to prepare for all AWS certifications, visit Cloud Academy’s AWS library for the latest.

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Chances are that if you are using CloudAcademy.com to learn or test your skills, you are looking also for a new job. We have thousands of people that use our platform to prepare for a certification and they simply want to apply for trillions of new jobs now available in the cloud market; today I want to share my opinion on why focusing on one single provider is wrong and a cloud professional should be able to operate on more than one platform. In my opinion, all the signals that we have say that AWS will soon face competition from a bunch of other important companies.

The Financial Times has just published Cloud computing in numbers, an interesting report about the growth of this industry from 2014 till 2020. While in 2014 the cloud computing market will be valued $154 Billion, in 2018 that should be almost the double, at $290 Billions of dollars.

Do not focus only on one platform: Amazon Web Services is ok, but it’s not the only one

I think that having a good knowledge of AWS is only the starting point to get more job opportunities. Google, Rackspace, and Azure should be your next focus, and, in general, you should be able to manage a cloud infrastructure in more than one single public provider.

Companies are looking for best practices and cases where they can optimize their budget landing their services on more than one cloud computing provider: having a set of skills across many platforms will give you a great opportunity. Imagine a scenario where you need to implement a new software architecture on different public clouds. With different prices and an always more aggressive offer from Azure and Google, some companies are now migrating from one platform to another or they are using both, distributing all the services based on where they can be more convenient.

I think that 2014 will be the year where we see a growing number of public clouds trying to compete with AWS: some of them, like Google Compute Engine, has already started and they will be more aggressive during the next months, some others are just working in a stealth mode and they will be ready for the second half of the year. Think about CenturylinkCloud.

Even if OpenStack is not yet a problem for Amazon Web Services, it’s growing fast and Red Hat could be the right company to speed up its adoption on the enterprise.
If I have to bet on the next big AWS’s competitor I would say Google. That’s the company with more potential on infrastructure investments, cloud, and software engineering knowledge. They know pretty well how to attract developers and enterprises.

The learning gap: why AWS is so popular

Cloud Computing forecast 2014-2016While we build CloudAcademy.com, we are always more noticing how popular is AWS in terms of tutorials, how-to, white papers, and business cases. The situation is totally different when we approach Google, Azure or Rackspace: those platforms have not the same number and quality of resources that you can find for AWS. Amazon has invested in events, communities and had an approach totally oriented to developers and startups that paid out in the long term with free content marketing and a lot of free documentation to use AWS in any situation with any popular software.

This situation is going to change during this year: Google and Microsoft are going to invest billions of dollars in cloud computing and so will do also IBM, Rackspace and a bunch of smaller firms that are now competing for the public cloud market.

Yesterday we launched our first set of learning content dedicated to Google Compute Engine, you should check it out. It’s the first step to understand how much it’s different from Amazon Web Services, always using CloudAcademy.com.

Certifications matter

They play the big game here. Amazon had a huge advantage of launching a dedicated certification program for AWS: it’s getting popular among developers, DevOps, system administrators, and even less skilled professionals. In fact, after launching our CloudCareer for AWS Solutions Architect, we have seen that more than 20% of our learning statements are now daily served by CloudCareer.

There is no doubt that Google is working on a certification program for its Google Cloud Platform and I bet that will be the path for many other cloud providers that are now investing in learning and training to get new customers aboard.

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