Career implications

Our considered opinion is that the move to the cloud is going to affect a lot of folks more than they expect. In particular, employees at a host of IT services companies and system integrators will need to retool fast. Now that's not to say that these companies are clear losers, because the cloud services are pretty complex too and will provide lots of room for several different ecosystems. Some things that used to be hard will now be easy, and some things that used to be easy will now be hard. Workforces will need to be retrained, and the expectations of career trajectories will need to be changed. So, if you are new to the cloud world, here are three topics you might want to spend time really understanding—these are now a lot more important than they used to be:

• Containers, Docker, and Kubernetes
•  Load balancers
• IaaS technologies such as Terraform or Google Cloud Deployment Manager

On the other hand, folks who are in the following teams probably need to think long and hard about how to get with today's (and tomorrow's) hot technologies because the cloud is radically simplifying what they currently work on:

• Virtual Machines and IaaS sysadmins
• Physical networking, router, and VPN engineers
• Hadoop administrators