2021 will see a big war for cloud skills

The new war for talent is being fought in the cloud. Demand for cloud has shot through the roof since the beginning of the pandemic, as businesses try to build resiliency.

India has 6 lakh cloud practitioners. Of these, 3.7 lakh have one cloud certification each. And just 85,000 have one of the top 5 cloud certifications, showed data from Bengaluru-based talent consultancy firm Han Digital.

Certified cloud architects with over 8 years of work experience are among the cream of cloud talent and there are just 25,000 of them in India. They earn a median salary of over Rs 30 lakh.

The top cloud players include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Salesforce and SAP.

Forrester predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021. It said pre-pandemic, about 20% of developers regularly used container and serverless functions to build new apps and modernise old ones. It predicts 25% of developers will use serverless and nearly 30% will use containers regularly by the end of 2021, creating a spike in global demand for both multi-cloud container development platforms and public-cloud container/serverless services.

Containers enable an application to run quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. It has made the job of developers much easier as enterprises increasingly move to an environment where they use multiple clouds.

There is a sharp differentiation in the career trajectory and compensation for run-the-cloud and build-the-cloud workforces. The traditional army of coders with low-ball salaries will have little say at the bargaining table.

Build-the-cloud professionals are super specialists who are steeped into application design, cloud computing models SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, and cloud deployment across private, public and hybrid environments. These niche cloud professionals with at least 12 years of experience draw a median salary in the range of Rs 35-38 lakh annually.

An AWS cloud specialist commands a 20-25% premium over median salaries, while for an Azure and Google Cloud specialist, the premium is 25% and 20% respectively. They should know multiple programming languages, and have experience in architecture and integration.

For a work experience of 8-12 years, the commensurate median salaries across three clouds – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – is between Rs 16-18 lakh.

Build-the-cloud skills will have an average of 25% higher pay compared to run-the-cloud skills. “By 2021, more than 90,000 of the 600,000 cloud practitioners will change their current jobs in the IT/BPM sector in India. More than 50,000 job seekers will enter the cloud practitioners’ talent pool as a primary skill. Build-the-cloud is a super specialised solution driven activity,” said Han Digital founder Saravanan Balasundaram.

Run-the-cloud skills include cloud engineering, cloud developer or database administrator.

Han Digital predicts that at any point in time there will be more than 40,000 cloud related open jobs available among the Indian IT/BPM players.

Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce and Workday are expected to be the top trending cloud platforms this year.

Balasundaram said some of the top front-end skills include React, Angular, Vue.js, while at the backend, Java/.Net with microservices, Golang, NodeJS are hot skills. New-age frameworks like Kafka, Spark, Hive are gaining popularity. ToI