Cloud Engineering Enables The World’s Modern Tech Infrastructure
Cloud Engineering is:
“a field of engineering that focuses on cloud services, such as “software as a service”, “platform as a service”, and “infrastructure as a service”.
It is a multidisciplinary method encompassing contributions from diverse areas… [of IT engineering]…”
With nearly 70% of enterprise IT using public cloud infrastructure, cloud engineering roles are a necessity. Businesses are migrating from “on premise” to the “Cloud” — this calls for engineers who are familiar with leading public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
The phrase and concept cloud engineer has been official since only April 2009 — and the first IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) took place on March 2013. This trend is in its earliest days and will continue.
Cloud engineering professionals are responsible for analyzing business infrastructure and various cloud migrations. Their work entails open source software development, system engineering, scripting, familiarity with multiple cloud platforms, and web services.
These engineers are the designers, builders and 24/7 repair and watchmen for all business infrastructure constructed on the Cloud.
They wear many hats covering a wide range of issues, including IT architecture, software, security, systems, and networking. They use APIs, automation, orchestration, and databases — within DevOps framework and practices — to enable storage, virtualization, containers, and security.
There are several broad sub-categories of Cloud Engineering, including: Solutions Architecture, Cloud development and Systems Operations.
Solutions Architecture provides the “blueprint” for a business’ cloud infrastructure.
This involves the design and deployment of enterprise-scale IT infrastructures within Cloud environments. Solutions Architects’ designs are informed by decision-makers’ requirements. Appropriate applications are chosen so that once deployed their performance will be cost-effective, scalable, secure and reliable. These can involve the migration of a complex array of applications on Cloud platforms.
Cloud developers read the “blueprints” and do the building — they develop applications and code are the “bricks” they use to build cloud infrastructure. They typically know how to “speak”, how to code, in at least one high level programming language and are familiar with various public Cloud environments. They use APIs, command line interfaces, and Software Development Kits (SDKs) within a cloud platform — and are likely guided by DevOps philosophy and practices.
They will know cloud architecture practices as surely as brick & mortar builders know how to read blueprints and best construction practices. In effect these builders know how use architects’ designs to assemble, install and fix the applications involved in making a cloud infrastructure — the IT terminology is more like develop, deploy and debug.
System Operations engineers are system administrators (“sysadmins”). Just as the architects made the blueprints and the developers built the infrastructure, now someone has to keep watch over and maintain that IT structure. Systems Operations for cloud environments involves monitoring, virtualization, networking. Sysadmins can deploy solutions architecture designs cost-effectively for compute, data, network and security.
A Cloud Engineering role’s basic requirements, based on recent trends, includes the following considerations:
While there is more than one public cloud platform, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, the mostly likely platform used by engineers may be AWS. Amazon was the first major cloud provider — Amazon Web Services (AWS) was released in 2006 — and it currently has a 40+% share of application workloads versus Microsoft Azure’s nearly 30% holding.
Azure, released by Microsoft 4 years after AWS in 2010, is known for supporting a large share of artificial intelligence, IoT and analytics work.
It’s a given that scripting, or “shell scripting” is part of a cloud engineering professional’s skills because cost-effective successful cloud deployment includes automation. The automation of repetitive tasks by code is an essential skill for engineers and a core basic requirement for cloud and software design and deployments.
Cloud engineering professionals should know some version of SQL (e.g NoSQL) for database management and data manipulation. And one of the most in demand programming languages is Python. While Python has been used for building the kinds of scalable apps ideal for cloud environments, another essential programming language is also Linux — which underlies nearly all public cloud workloads.
This is not a comprehensive description because it will eventually change.
The most essential skill for anyone with a cloud engineering role is learning.
The migration of the world’s modern economy to the Cloud is in its early days.
As the world’s tech infrastructure evolves so will cloud engineering needs.
You don’t have to recruit a Cloud Engineer in-house but you can reach out for advice about what to do next — it all begins with an email or voice chat.
