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Conclusion
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Difficulty
Beginner
Duration
20m
Students
2598
Ratings
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Description

This course describes 6 different positions in the cloud computing industry, all of which are in high demand as established companies move to cloud technologies, companies expand IT departments, and new companies form. There’s great opportunity for fulfilling work with great pay. Overall it’s a great time to be in the cloud computing industry (which is rapidly becoming the IT industry).

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Careers in Cloud Computing course. I'm Adam Hawkins and I'm your instructor for this lesson. This lesson concludes the course by recapping the positions we covered, giving you some last recommendations, and setting you about with your future next steps. Let's recap each position with a few words.

Engineer is your general purpose engineer for building features, fixing bugs in any type of application. There are entry, mid, and senior level positions open across the industry.

Data engineer is the gateway to business insight. They build the data infrastructure to answer business questions. There should be entry, mid, and senior level opportunities in growing teams. The system administrator maintains various IT systems. This may cover system provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and decommissioning. Also, this position may be undergoing the most rapid change of the bunch.

The DevOps engineer and Site Reliability Engineer or SRE are two sides of the same coin, really working well on improving the quality in the final product. Both touch all phases of the software development process and act as force multipliers for the rest of the team. They are in-demand positions and the requirements are changing fast.

Architect is your IT city planner. They make the big decisions on what goes where, how to prioritize each area, and what the shape of the final solution looks like. It requires years of knowledge to answer theses kind of questions and bridge the gap between business and tech. Hopefully you'll find something interesting about these positions. There are important things you need to remember about them and Cloud Computing in general before pursuing a career in Cloud Computing.

First off, there will be overlap between these positions in a vast majority of teams. This is especially true the smaller a team is. It's simply not possible to specialize in a team size of three. However, a team of 300 is a completely different story so be prepared to change hats and move between different technical domains in your daily work. Second, odds are your existing job in any of these positions is not going away if your company is moving to Cloud Computing. It's more likely that your responsibilities will change to match cloud architecture. Commonly, this means a move towards more programming, automation and abstraction so be prepared to gain some new skills and lose some old ones. Third and finally, set your expectations and look accordingly.

If you have no IT experience and want to enter IT or Cloud Computing then start with the engineer position. You just won't have the skills required for the other roles. If you're already working in IT, then you probably have a better idea of what kind of position you're interested in so I recommend you talk to your friends or colleagues or read some postings to find out about the real deal. Remember to keep the questions from earlier in this course in mind when discussing the positions. They'll help you much more than you think. So, do you know what you're gonna do next?

Here are some suggestions if you don't. Start by choosing a learning path. I recommend you pair the DevOps learning path with either the AWS, GCP, or Azure learning paths. This should cover most of the basis for you. Then check the introductory courses if you need more background. Also, use those skills to build something. There's no substitute in this industry for getting your hands down and dirty building something. Odds are if you don't like doing that and it's not a lot of fun, this is not the field for you. Finally, just go out there and talk to people. Find people you know or people online and talk to them about their job. This will help you get a feel for the differences and what fits you best.

Well my friend, that's all I have for you. I hope you enjoyed this course and that it helped you evaluate different career decisions. Best of luck out there and I hope you find what you're looking for. Cheers.

About the Author

Adam is backend/service engineer turned deployment and infrastructure engineer. His passion is building rock solid services and equally powerful deployment pipelines. He has been working with Docker for years and leads the SRE team at Saltside. Outside of work he's a traveller, beach bum, and trance addict.

Covered Topics