2018 was a banner year in cloud computing, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) all continuing to launch new and innovative services. We also saw growth among enterprises in the adoption of methodologies supporting the move toward cloud-native architectures, including increased investment in DevOps and security.
With the new year on the horizon, our market research team spoke to our staff subject matter experts about where enterprise cloud and skill development is heading in 2019. Here are six predictions they offered, three for enterprise skill development and three for the cloud computing industry:
Prediction #1: Organizations will begin building their own internal certifications
According to our Cloud Catalog research, adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud continues to grow. Organizations are customizing public cloud platforms, deploying their own software, and building their technology stacks with their internal processes and requirements in mind.
Every path towards technology development will differ and there will be a need for both standard and customized training that caters to specific job roles within organizations. Leadership will want to ensure that new employees onboard and hit the ground running. As a result, we predict that organizations will begin offering internal certifications to gauge existing skills and assess understanding of the existing and future-state technology stack.
Prediction #2: Organizations will approach employee development from a quantifiable perspective
A skills gap continues to persist, costing organizations $258 million per year according to Rackspace. The tightening labor market in the US will only further the impact to organizations undergoing transformation projects. Organizations must work harder to build and retain the skills of existing talent so they can build or maintain a competitive edge in their industry.
To track skills growth, organizational leaders will invest in a new breed of learning solutions that track skills growth, measure effort and offer assessments that gauge capability and opportunity. Armed with data, organizations will have increasingly assign context-aware training and take a more business-like approach to skills development than they have in the past.
Prediction #3: Organizations will appoint Digital Skills Officers to manage their team’s technical skills
In our discussions with new customers, we frequently hear about a disconnect between their historical training programs and the skills their teams need in order to be successful. Often times, training is offered without structure and does not align with technical goals.
We predict that organizations will appoint Digital Skills Officers to help manage their team’s technical skills in an effort to create structure in their training efforts. Digital Skills Officers work closely with the office of the CTO and CIO to align training efforts with technical roadmaps, focusing on contextualized training to drive successful learning outcomes.
Prediction #4: Kubernetes will contribute to increased multi-cloud adoption
More organizations are adopting containers so their software can be migrated quickly and reliably between computing environments. Containerization at scale is possible through orchestration tools, led by Kubernetes, an open source tool known for its robustness in deploying and managing container-based applications.
Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services recently began offering Kubernetes services, making it easier for organizations to deploy their applications across multiple cloud platforms and implement multi-cloud strategies. In fact, our research through Cloud Catalog confirms this, showing an increase in job postings that mention Kubernetes alongside AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Prediction #5: Ansible will overtake Puppet and Chef as the preferred DevOps automation tool
DevOps continues to interest organizations looking to streamline their innovation efforts. Within these efforts is a continued push towards automation, which allows organizations to keep up with business demand.
Among technical practitioners, Ansible’s DevOps automation is easier to use than Chef and Puppet due to its simpler configuration language and its agentless deployment. According to our research, organizational demand for Ansible is rising and we predict that its ease of use, along with its recent addition to IBM’s portfolio by way of its Red Hat acquisition, will drive its preference as the preferred DevOps automation tool.
Prediction #6: Full-stack developers will increasingly need to understand data processing engines like Spark
As organizations move to the cloud, the capabilities of the data engineer role are unlocked in new ways. More and more organizations are leveraging data processing and analytics to run their core businesses. We predict that expertise with data processing engines like Spark, typically the domain of just data engineering, will become increasingly important for Full-Stack Engineers and other computer science related roles.
As customer and employee experiences begin to rely on the data that end users give to companies, applications will need to be able to quickly capitalize on it in meaningful ways. We are already seeing signs in our job role market data that this trend is underway.
Do you agree with these predictions? Disagree? Tweet us @cloudacademy.
