Top IT Cloud Skills You Need in 2022

The business world responded to the pandemic-induced constraints by tapping into the IT skills of professionals to embrace cloud solutions. This enabled enterprises to ensure business as usual, even when employees worked from home. The pursuit of digital transformation will likely increase in 2022, as will the jobs associated with keeping the cloud infrastructure running. According to the Linux Foundation's 2021 Open Source Jobs Report, cloud-native IT skills were highly in demand last year. The trend will likely spill over to 2022, with cloud computing, specific configuration, deployment, security, and troubleshooting for cloud services being the buzzwords among hiring managers. According to The Enterprisers Project, employers actively search for professionals with IT certification in Kubernetes and cloud DevOps.  

How Cloud Technology Has Changed in 2022

Cloud technology has advanced dramatically in recent years, providing businesses with endless opportunities to rethink and reinvent their operations. That high pace of development is expected to continue in 2022. Cloud native is changing the face of IT as applications are designed to embrace rapid change, elasticity, scalability and resiliency. Elasticity refers to the ability to quickly expand or decrease computer processing, memory, and storage resources to meet changing demands without worrying about capacity planning and engineering for peak usage. For example, an application might lie dormant all day except when most everyone in the company has to go into it and complete an end-of-the-week report Friday by the end of the day. There may be great use of the processing and memory needed only needed at those peak times and then they will both shrink back down as they are barely being used at all other times. Scalability refers to the ability to add on or remove portions of the application in response to business needs. Resiliency refers to the ability to recover from failures and continue to function. Even when traditional applications are moved to the cloud, they still lack these abilities as they were designed differently than cloud native apps.

Development teams and operations teams are coming together — hence the term DevOps — to better design, test and deploy cloud native applications. However, the talent to drive this transformation is in short supply. “There is a shortage of cloud talent today, threatening cloud transformation projects essential to business survival,” said Cloudreach CEO Brooks Borcherding, according to a March 2022 blog post on SDXCentral, a U.S.-based technology journalism and market data research company.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. Gartner believes that the operating model for organizations shifting toward cloud native will result in the creation of new jobs and responsibilities.

Top IT Skills for Cloud Professionals

Cloud is becoming a standard of data management and storage and  has become a priority for organizations. The cloud computing field offers various roles available in database management, development, security, and analysis. 

There are various IT skills that are needed to work in the cloud. You’ll need skills in development or operations and experience in the combined practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery or continuous deployment to bridge the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing and deployment of applications.

The Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report finds that cloud adoption continues to become more mainstream, as figure 7 shows. Heavy users (currently running more than 25% of workloads in the cloud) are up to 63%, an increase from 59% in 2021 and 53% in 2020. Similarly, respondents who reported light usage decreased from 19% to 14%, implying more organizations are advancing through their cloud journeys.

Below is a list of the top five IT cloud skills that IT professionals should have in 2022.

1.    Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning  

According to Emsi Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country, the number of job postings requesting AI skills will increase 297% over the next two years. The most critical skill for machine learning engineering positions is a thorough understanding of basic machine learning skills, such as computer science, analytics, programming, and cloud computing. As a result, artificial intelligence fundamentals are the most in-demand machine learning engineering skills. Knowledge of standard algorithms, regression, gradient descent, logistic regression, linear regression, and other popular modeling approaches is required. Learn about AI and machine learning.

2.    Cloud Security

Cloud security is a discipline of cybersecurity dedicated to securing cloud computing systems. As of 2022, over 60% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud, according to Statista. But some vulnerabilities result from cloud computing, such as those in containers, APIs, and insecure third-party applications that your systems integrate with poorly configured security tools. According to recent data by Cyberseek.org, there were approximately 500,000 open jobs related to cybersecurity between April 2020 and March 2021. Burning Glass ranks cloud security as the second fastest-growing cybersecurity field. Learn about cloud security.

3.    Containers & Kubernetes 

Containers have grown in popularity because they provide a powerful tool for addressing several essential concerns shared by application developers, such as the requirement for faster delivery, agility, portability, modernization, and lifecycle management. DevOps Digest predicts that containers will become widespread in 2022 to meet this demand, making the generational transfer to the cloud much easier and more streamlined for enterprises. More clients will begin establishing their cloud infrastructure with Kubernetes and deploying it in production. Adoption is still in its early stages, particularly for large-scale deployments, but the trend will increase as more enterprises use Kubernetes as their primary IT platform. Furthermore, the sorts of apps that migrate to Kubernetes will be more diverse, with a mix of classic business applications based on databases and emerging applications built around AI/ML and data analytics. Learn about containers and Kubernetes.                     

4.    Serverless

Serverless is a new software architecture in which the public cloud hosts applications to make it easier for developers to write code that will operate on a cloud platform.  Developers spend 41% of their day on infrastructure maintenance instead of innovation or bringing new products to market, according to New Stack, a U.S.–based technology organization. Serverless computing removes infrastructure responsibilities, such as hardware and software, while lowering costs and increasing delivery speed. Learn about serverless.

5.    Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) 

Terraform, from HashiCorp, is widely used to automate infrastructure. This feature facilitates infrastructure tasks, such as configuration, provisioning, and code management. Using Terraform's single workflow, you can plan and deploy IaC across many infrastructure providers. Terraform can design and deploy IaC quickly by expressing the required infrastructure as code. Users can perform a pre-execution check on Terraform before updating or provisioning infrastructure to determine if the settings meet expected results. Users can choose their preferred cloud architecture using a single CLI across several cloud providers. The ability to quickly set up multiple environments using the same configuration and manage the entire lifecycle of your selected infrastructure reduces human error and improves automation. Learn about IaC.

If you have set your sights on the cloud, ExitCertified can help you scale up. ExitCertified has partnered with all the major players in public cloud training, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, and Oracle to help you learn the newest cloud computing strategies. From coding and containers to machine learning and cloud analytics, discover how ExitCertified can give you a competitive advantage to your knowledge and experience with everything under a cloud.