How Cloud Computing is Changing the Demand for IT Skills

(Update) We’ve recently released some new product features to further enhance your training experience:

Hands-on Labs, live cloud environments for your team to build and validate practical experience directly on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Kubernetes, data pipelines, and much more.

Training Plans will help you assign, manage, and measure structured cloud training at scale.

Skill Assessment will help you trend your team’s aptitude by platform, domain, and topic and identify possible skill gaps.

To get a definition of the roles needed to maximize your organization’s investment in cloud, explore the latest skills in demand by job role with Cloud Academy’s Cloud Roster™.


There is no doubt that Cloud Computing is a big change for the IT world, but what is not that clear is actually that the cloud computing industry is also changing the skills set requested for most of IT positions in the world. The great growth of services like AWS and Rackspace Cloud is now leading the requests of skilled professional to handle cloud infrastructures with a deep knowledge of the single public cloud platform.

Companies are getting used in outsourcing software (from SaaS to IaaS solutions) and infrastructure in the cloud, so CIO and IT managers now need to know exactly how to deal with new public cloud infrastructures, how to integrate them with a set of API in the existing data center and sometimes how to provide scalability and business continuity to their applications in the cloud, an aspect that rely mostly on a great experience on the specific cloud computing vendor. Think about Netflix, a company that operates 90% of its infrastructure inside AWS, they need a lot of DevOps” people with good experience with Amazon’s platform. But they are not alone, most of the new startups today start a project using a cloud computing platform, without investing money for dedicated server or data center space.

Examples? Well, check out the last Startup Challenge Competition organized by Amazon to get an idea of what business is using cloud computing environments.

Five years ago a good sysadmin was highly skilled in distributed environments (Linux or Windows based), shell scripting and server management, today he needs also a strong knowledge related to cloud environments, and plus, he must be able to interact with different ecosystems, have planning skills in order to forecast the growth of applications in the cloud and also a good knowledge of vendor features for the cloud computing market.

Check out what Forbes identifies as new role in the cloud computing era!

Cloud Academy