So for my job, I am a DevOps engineer, and a very reluctant cloud engineer. I work mostly with AWS, but I've done some OpenStack, Digital Ocean, and Azure here and there. Cloud Engineering is very cool, and I've worked on quite a few big cloud projects. Working in cloud also commands a lot of money, which helps because I have somewhat of a cryptocurrency addiction. Anyway, the crux of this argument is the demand for cloud engineers in the future.
So let's be honest, management hate sys admins. While I think the contemporary culture of most businesses have given senior management a respect for software engineers and application developers. They have pretty much loathed the System Administrator. System Administrators are the red headed step child of the tech world. We work super long hours, and we're stepped in technical details. We have to figure out how to configure software, at scale, in a cost efficient way, and we need to do it fast all the time. And some companies want to do more with less, so they understaff their sys admins, and refuse to add more hardware to help out with the scalability.
Enter the cloud. Now developers can create their own servers on the fly and "get stuff done" right away. Senior management loves the cloud, it empowers developers to create their own infrastructure without those pesky System Administrators who don't seem to get a lot done. Then reality sets in. Yeah you just stood up a "dev environment" but it was manually created. Oh what? Your CSP had an outage and blew away your dev environment? We can't recreate it? Ahh!
Enter the Cloud Engineer/SRE/DevOps Engineer. Now we have engineers who are more modern, basically system administrators who now had to adopt some developer habits. Now we have infrastructure as code, emphasis on repeatability, log aggregation, and we need to make sure we can capture every piece of our infrastructure into charts, because we all know senior management hates to read. They know that could is this cool thing that "should" save money, but it doesn't because the developers and managers don't have any discipline. And they've forgotten how to respond to emergencies, and decided to go "all in" in on the cloud. And now they know they need experts because there is a little more to management infrastructure than standing up a server and installing stuff.
Ok so maybe I should get to the point. As a DevOps guy who has extensive Python/Java experience, with databases, CI/CD and cloud (with a cherry on top). I have been enjoying my employability. But part of me ask how much of a fad this all is. I mean really how many "new cloud" projects actually exist? And how many managers really know how to measure success anyway? I think a lot of companies are making the mad dash to the cloud right now, and they're willing to spend top dollars to get there. But at what point do they decide that they actually don't need the cloud? And what about the ones who've figured it out already?
This is why I think we're heading towards a bubble for the Cloud space. It's the brand new shiny thing, but clouds haven't rendered on-prem datacenters obsolete at all. There will always be companies who just won't trust the security of the cloud, and some people who need the better performance you get going on prem. And the ones on the cloud, maybe they'll decide they just don't need as much of it. I do see the cloud demand somewhat stabilizing by quite a bit. And cloud service offerings still tend to be a little too "one size fit all" with very little flexibility. Just compare Amazon ELB to F5 LB, and you'll see just how some of the products just don't measure up. And this isn't just for a few things, it's for a lot of things.
This is not to say the cloud is going anywhere soon. I think it's here to stay for better or worse. But in my industry I can't help but to think that the cloud may be overvalued at the moment. While one can say the same thing for Big Data and machine learning, I think data is simply something that no company can justify being without. Especially in the competitive landscape we live in today. Data is knowledge, and knowledge is power. However for the cloud, sometimes the tangible benefits aren't felt right away. But who knows maybe guys like me will be the future decisions makers.