Oh boy, MCCEs
Microsoft Certified Cloud Engineers, looks like the late 90s have come back around. :-)
Last time people, Cloud is...
- VMs running on your machines or someone else's
- Easily changeable networking
- Flexible storage
- Flexible provisioning model
- In some cases, magic SaaS that you're told to ignore the inner workings of
Any systems guy who understands all of the underlying technology and can work with whatever automation framework ties it all together is a Cloud Engineer. The main difference with the Cloud in terms of AWS/Azure/whatever public or private cloud is that developers get the chance to run wild on someone else's hardware and without properly sizing/scaling their application. And in the public cloud, developers often don't see the results of a bad architectural decision or a runaway application because of the scale of the back end.
The thing is, the public cloud is pretty cool taken with the right grain of salt. For the most part, Amazon and Microsoft have made sane architectural choices, and provide devs the opportunity to properly build in failover, etc. into the system. The problem is when developers who may or may not get the entire "big system picture" are able to throw up huge production applications with big flaws in their design in the name of agile development. That's when you hear of a startup's web applications falling over because someone decided not to invest in the additional availability zone, etc.
I think the big thing that's coming up next is that systems integration, aka the "make shit work" department will be seen as more important than it is now. Devs are great, sysadmins are great, but the real test is when you slap 17 things that weren't designed to go together into the same space and start grinding out the dependencies. (This is what I do, and it's something that there's no certification for...you need a very good teacher and OJT in the form of a stream of crazy problems to solve.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
