Hello, and welcome to the Careers in Cloud Computing course. I'm Adam Hawkins, and I am your instructor for this course.

This course describes six different positions in the cloud computing industry. The positions covered in this course may be found on most current job boards. They're in demand as established companies move towards cloud technologies, companies expand IT departments and new companies form. There's great opportunities for fulfilling work with great pay. Overall, it's a great time to be in the cloud computing industry, which I might add, is rapidly becoming the IT industry.

The goal for this course is to help you evaluate different careers in cloud computing. I'll do that by covering the roles and responsibilities, technical skills, general salary arrange, and relevant trainings or certifications for the following positions. Engineer, this is your general purpose application developer. Data Engineer is the gateway to business insight. Systems Administrator is the IT groundskeeper. DevOps Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer, this is your IT automation grab bag. And Architect is kind of your city planner. This course is intended for people evaluating different career paths. Perhaps you're an IT worker looking to make a change, or working with a company that is moving to cloud technologies. Hopefully, you're familiar with the idea behind cloud computing. You may have a hard time understanding the subtle difference between these positions if you don't have any existing IT experience.

Now, I'm going to drop a small spoiler here. All of these positions overlap in one or more ways. Modern IT workers wear many hats, so odds are you'll end up switching a little bit between each of these positions, depending on where you'll end up. So don't be surprised if that happens. Also, the best part of all. Each of these positions involves writing code and building software. Or, I meant to say that's actually the best part, right? So let's start the course by discussing what an engineer is these days anyway.