Iskandar Najmuddin, Specialist Architect at Rackspace, discusses how container adoption could plug the enterprise cloud skills gap.
Businesses increasingly rely on complex technologies to power their day-to-day business operations. These complex solutions can require highly skilled and supportive expertise, forcing many organisations to spend large amounts of time and effort on the maintenance of basic daily tasks.
Automating processes is time consuming and as a result, businesses are finding their ability to innovate increasingly restricted. Furthermore, the demand for a highly skilled workforce to support day-to-day business activity is putting pressure on an already overstretched industry, with the situation set to worsen – the British Computer Society has warned that the number of students pursuing a computing qualification could halve by 2020.
Unsurprisingly, cloud technologies and the skills surrounding their implementation are seeing a huge increase in demand. According to a recent study from IDC, nearly all businesses now rely on an infrastructure that uses ‘multiple private and public clouds based on economics, location and policies’. With businesses now potentially working across several different clouds at the same time, the scale of implementing and managing disparate environments is huge.
It is now vital that organisations quickly acquire the expertise to plug the IT skills gap, whether through upskilling current staff or relying on external recruitment. These evolving needs are changing the IT skills landscape rapidly, as demands faced by businesses dictate which skills are in vogue.
Containing cloud complexity
Container technology comes with an ecosystem that helps simplify the growing business operations that are hosted within cloud infrastructures. As a technology that has experienced a recent surge in interest, many organisations are using containers to simplify the growing complexity of enterprise infrastructure. The rising demand for containers, which in 2016 generated US$762 million in revenue, is forecast by 451 Research to reach US$2.7 billion in 2020, proving its growing popularity.
As executable packages of software, containers include everything they need to run themselves: code, run-time, system tools, system libraries and settings. This is what makes containers incredibly beneficial. In short, containerised software will run predictably regardless of where it is used, even in different clouds. For businesses that span across different computing environments, consistency, predictability, isolation and portability is far easier to achieve, alleviating some of the immediate pressure for a grand-scale, up-skilled workforce.
Containers and more
Projects such as Docker, an open-source tool that provides abstraction, automation and APIs to make containers easy to build, manage and deploy, have seen a sharp increase in interest in light of the demand for containers. Using ITJobsWatch, we found that the number of permanent jobs citing Docker have doubled in the six months running up to February 2018, with no signs of slowing down.
This mirrors the results of Rackspace’s IT skills analysis in 2016 which revealed that business’ desire to stay on top of new tools and their constantly changing features is part of the reason why the demand for professionals with Docker expertise grew by a considerable 341% between 2015 and 2016.
Docker isn’t the only tool that has been driven by the increase in container demand: Google’s Kubernetes project has seen meteoric growth in demand for engineers, increasing by 919% since 2016. As a platform for automating the deployment, scaling and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, Kubernetes uses Docker (along with other container run-times) to both scale enterprise services and ensure they are always relevant.
However, the gap between the expertise available to implement these technologies and the rate at which professionals are acquiring relevant skillsets is quickly widening. The sudden increase in demand for these skills has created a gap between the expertise available and the rate at which professionals are acquiring the relevant skillsets. Thankfully, there are a number of ways that cloud engineers and developers can work towards learning these skills.
Keeping up with demand
Whilst trying to maintain business operations to required demand, many organisations are discovering that they need talented individuals who can work on multiple platforms and computing environments. Hiring new staff is the typical solution to such a problem, yet the growing IT skills gap is making this increasingly difficult to action. There are, however, a couple of different approaches companies can take:
- Upskill tactically – Identifying and developing new skills must be done tactically as there is no instant fix to the talent shortage. By strategically investing in more transferable skill sets, companies can get the maximum impact from their investment, for example, those with Docker skills can also use Kubernetes.
- Play the long game – Invest in the skills you will need in the future, as well as those that you need now. Don’t educate a team member to fulfil only one task. Build an education engine that continuously invests in the upskilling of team members to meet the constant evolution of cloud services.
- Invest in time – It is crucial that businesses provide both the tools and time for staff to learn and practise with new skills and software. Investing in staff education programmes without providing dedicated time for training is unsustainable and uneconomical.
- Automation – By automating basic processes, existing talent is empowered to focus on creating additional value. The burden on IT professionals is significantly reduced when automated solutions can maintain day-to-day enterprise operations.
- Outsourcing talent – Alternatively, a business could look to outsource their needs to a managed cloud provider, who is more likely to have talent with this expertise. If the engagement is based on a collaborative model, the businesses’ staff then also develop an understanding of the software through working with the managed cloud provider’s experts.
A solid, universal knowledge of containers is particularly difficult to achieve. However, the container ecosystem is evolving at such pace that any detailed curriculum would soon be out of date. This explains why, at this moment, upskilling and outsourcing talent remain the best methods to keep up with the demand of containers.
Upskilling and outsourcing are only temporary solutions to an ever-growing IT skills crisis. The widening skills gap in technology must be addressed by technical stakeholders and businesses with great urgency. Those who don’t foster talent will ultimately be out-paced, out-innovated and ousted from the market by competitors who do keep pace with the change.
It is easy for engineers to become irrelevant in times where demands of enterprises are changing and when competing against staff with in-demand talents. Platforms like Kubernetes and Docker are just starting to gain traction, yet these are the foundation platforms that enable flexible Platform-as-a-Service approaches that enable creativity, experimentation and business innovation. Businesses must embrace the evolution of the tech landscape and ensure the skillsets needed are fully accessible.
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