“IT, in the age of cloud, requires a very diverse set of skills including virtualization, networking, security, storage, and programming skills.”
Virtualization and cloud technologies have enabled the harnessing of never imagined amounts of computing, storage, and network bandwidth, paving the way for applications that were out of reach just a few years ago. Are you ready?
“The tidal wave of these technologies—artificial intelligence and big data analysis—have started long-term trends that are shaping our current and future technologies, says Juan C. Gomez, Ph.D. a software development engineer at Amazon AWS and chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Information Technology certificate program.
It means people interested in pursuing jobs in Information Technology need a broad understanding of the landscape
“IT, in the age of cloud, requires a very diverse set of skills including virtualization, networking, security, storage, and programming skills,” Gomez says. “This is a superset of the skills that companies will require for IT engineers that handle on-premise resources.”
The changes he’s seeing include:
- More migration to the public cloud
- More pervasive applications of AI to all kind of businesses;
- Computing on demand as commonplace;
- The ability to analyze petabytes of data in very short amounts of time; and
- Decreased prices (since the work is now in the hands of the crowds).
“Public clouds are mutating into places where you find more than regular virtual machines,” Gomez says, noting that people can lease programmable hardware (FPGAs) to carry out intensive computing tasks such as gene sequencing at ever-increasing, unbelievable speeds.
Other exciting trends
The Race for Scale, Reliability, and Services
“Cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are in a race to provide support for ever-increasing amounts of computing, networking, and storage at ever decreasing prices,” Gomez says. “They’re also on a race to achieve 100 percent availability—24x7x365. They’re engaged in a battle to provide the largest amount of services—databases, logging infrastructure, and security products—all billed on demand by the second.”
Mass Cloud Migration
“The world of appliances or application-specific computers fine-tuned for certain applications is on a death spiral,” Gomez says. “Most companies are migrating their computing tasks to the cloud.”
As cloud reliability approaches 100 percent, even the companies that feared the cloud are taking the plunge and at least moving their non-critical tasks to cloud provider.
Multi-Cloud Efforts
As fears of cloud vendor lock-ins linger, we are just beginning to see the emergence of companies that virtualize the cloud and enable customers to migrate their computing needs across cloud vendors.
Integration of the Private and Public Cloud
While a number of companies still have critical tasks that they will keep onsite for years to come, the ability to integrate private and public cloud resources will be key to scale for bursts of traffic at peak times.