With the cloud market constantly evolving, it can become a little tedious to keep up with the new trends in regards to Cloud Computing. Talking about the trends in Cloud Computing, the current hottest buzzword, especially for those looking to start a career in Cloud Computing, is the Cloud Engineer job. In this blog, we will be understanding the roles and responsibilities of a Cloud Engineer. Once we get well acquainted with what the profile entails, we will look into the skills needed to carry out these roles and responsibilities.
Following is a list of all topics that will be covered in this blog:
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Who is a Cloud Engineer?
In the past decade, we have seen Cloud Computing go from a ‘luxury-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’ necessity in today’s business landscape. With this dramatic shift, the demand for an IT professional who can take care of the migration process and perform cloud-related tasks also increased exponentially. This was the ‘ground zero’ for the Cloud Engineer job role.
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If we have to put it into a definition, then a Cloud Engineer is an IT professional who takes care of all the technical workload related to Cloud Computing. This workload generally includes managing, planning, architecting, and monitoring cloud systems. It also includes knowing and implementing the best practices for deploying an application on the cloud.
Now, this is a basic generalization of the roles and responsibilities of a Cloud Engineer. Further in the blog, we will examine the tasks that different organizations expect the professional to accomplish.
Before we go ahead, there’s one issue that we need to address first. People often get confused between the job profile that is our topic of the day and other similar job roles, such as:
Keeping it short and straight to the point, a Solutions Architect, a Cloud Developer, or SysOps Engineer is essentially a Cloud Engineer with validated certification from vendors such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Now, there’s no hardcore prerequisite for professionals to be certified by any of these cloud providers, but if they are certified, they can be called Solutions Architects, Cloud Developers, or SysOps Engineers, depending on the certification. Regardless of the title, However, the main job roles and responsibilities of a Cloud Engineer remain the same.
Now let’s take a step forward and see ‘What does a Cloud Engineer do?’
What does a Cloud Engineer Do?
As mentioned earlier, this job role essentially encompasses the different qualities of various job roles. We have already seen the general roles and responsibilities of a Cloud Engineer. Now, let’s see the varying responsibilities of Cloud Engineers that they have to accomplish when they are titled as Solutions Architects, Cloud Developers, and SysOps Engineers. SysOps is focused on code deployment and infrastructure management while DevOps is focused on code deployment. Both DevOps and SysOps are essential for the modern DevOps team.
What does a Cloud Engineer do as a Solutions Architect?
- Designing and deploying applications on the cloud
- Identifying and using appropriate cloud services to support applications on the cloud
- Migrating on-premise applications of the organization to the cloud
- Maintaining the usage of cloud services and implementing cost-saving strategies
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What does a Cloud Engineer do as a Cloud Developer?
- Identifying the best practices of cloud architecture to support applications
- Using their programming knowledge to write codes for server-less applications
- Automating different parts of the development process
- Understanding the application life cycle and utilizing APIs
What does a Cloud Engineer do as a SysOps Engineer?
- Identifying potential bottlenecks in applications’ performance
- Strategizing a recovery plan to compensate for possible downtime or failure scenarios
- Maintaining data integrity by implementing proper access control for cloud services
- Managing network-related workloads including DNS and firewalls
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What does it take to become a Cloud Engineer?
As we have established that with the consistent increase in the adoption of Cloud Computing, the demand for Cloud Engineers is also increasing. So, people often find themselves asking questions, such as, ‘What should I learn to become a Cloud Engineer? ‘What skills do I need to have?’ and more.
Now that you know what most companies expect of you and what does a cloud engineer do, you can determine the skills you need to learn.
Skills to Focus On
- Experience with the Linux/UNIX operating system
- Complete knowledge of one of the cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Sound programming knowledge in one of the mentioned programming languages:
- Python
- Java
- GO
- R
- Clojure
- Be familiar with DevOps methodology and tools, such as Puppet, Chef, Git, Docker, etc.
- A clear understanding of APIs and web services
Find the difference between AWS, Azure, and GCP in the blog by Intellipaat.
What future does a Cloud Engineer hold?
Before jumping to any conclusions regarding the future scope of this job role, let’s first look at the following facts from various surveys on the Cloud Engineering job role.
- According to Gartner, US$146,350 was the median salary for Cloud Engineers in 2018. It’s a jump of $22,050 in two years; in 2016, the median salary was US$124,300.
- This job profile is in Forbes’ list of the top 25 highest-paying tech jobs.
- According to Glassdoor, this job role continues to be in high demand across US-based business enterprises with 8,215 job openings per month in the US alone.
- Gartner expects global public cloud revenue to grow by 17.5% in 2019.
- As per Forbes, 83 percent of the enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020, with 41 percent of them running on the public cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Now, what do all of these facts indicate? Well, one thing is for sure, Cloud Engineers are taking some big bucks home! It has even been cited as one of the highest-paying jobs by Forbes. Now, tell me if that doesn’t sound promising. Plus, it’s evident from Forbes’ reports that Cloud Computing is going to take over most of today’s business landscape in the coming years. Thus, it guarantees the fact that there will be a huge rise in the demand for Cloud Engineers, which is already huge enough as it is indicated by the thousands of job postings on Glassdoor. Therefore, it’s safe to say that your future is quite bright and secure in this profile.
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This brings us to the end of this blog, but if you are interested to start your career in the Cloud Engineer job role and are wondering how you can become one, then we have exactly what you need. Check out Intellipaat’s Cloud and DevOps Architect Master’s Course to kick-start your career as a Cloud Engineer!