Keith Fafel entered the world of cloud computing during the summer of 2010, while he was working as a product manager with Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based provider of hosted IT infrastructure services.
At the time, Fafel was working in Rackspace's monitoring services line of business, which provides information on the performance of the hardware and software that Rackspace runs for its customers. Rackspace had begun developing cloud-based hosting services, and it was trying to create monitoring solutions for customers provisioning those cloud-based services so that they could be assured their servers and load balancers were working properly. Fafel says he "inserted" himself in the conversation Rackspace was having on how it would develop monitoring software for the cloud.
"The excitement about the cloud was growing, and I wanted to be in the exciting growth areas," he says.
Fafel, who is now Rackspace's director of product for monitoring services, says the move to develop cloud-based monitoring services was a natural career progression for him. For many IT professionals, however, the move to developing applications and managing infrastructure based in the cloud feels anything but natural. Indeed, it seems downright intimidating, especially in light of all the talk about the possibility of cloud computing eliminating IT jobs.
Fafel and others working in the burgeoning field of cloud computing say the transition from a traditional IT environment to a cloud computing environment doesn't have to be difficult or daunting. They acknowledge it's a dramatic paradigm shift for IT, and they admit that the move will be hard for those IT professionals who dismiss cloud computing as a fad and who are wedded to particular operating systems and technology platforms. But for the IT professionals like Fafel who view adding cloud computing skills as a career opportunity, retooling their skill sets for the cloud will be a relatively straightforward process, they say.
Begin Retooling Now
"There's a great benefit today in that there are so many [training] resources available," says Bernard Golden, CEO of cloud computing and virtualization consulting company HyperStratus. "There are a lot of online resources, and a lot of these products you can use for free or they're dirt cheap. You have a real opportunity to get hands-on experience with a low barrier to entry."
IT professionals interested in learning about cloud computing would be wise to begin their education now, cloud computing experts agree.
"Right now, everyone is doing something as it relates to the cloud," says David Nichols, CIO Services leader for Ernst & Young. "They may have one or two applications in the cloud or are using it for storage. For just about everyone, what they're putting in the cloud is so small relative to the rest of their infrastructure that they don't have to worry about addressing this new business model separately."
The fact that most enterprises and IT departments are currently inching their way to the cloud, as Nichols describes, works to IT professionals' advantage: It takes some pressure off of them. They can learn at their own pace, as opposed to having to quickly come up to speed in the midst of a major cloud transformation. By starting their training now, they can get ahead of the technology curve.
"Cloud is here to stay. It is not a flash in the pan. It is a paradigm shift, and IT professionals need to recognize it," says Andy Knosp, vice president of professional services for Eucalyptus Software, a provider of a platform for private infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. "If they are going to increase their skills and their value in the [job] market, now is the time to get trained."
Here, cloud computing experts offer advice to IT professionals on how they can adapt their skill set for the cloud.
Get Your Head in the Cloud
The first step in retooling your skill set for the cloud is to understand the basics: That is, the concept of cloud computing, the different deployment models (public, private and hybrid) and use cases for them, and how the model differs from traditional IT operations.
At its most basic level, cloud computing is a way of dynamically delivering customized IT resources (such as applications, storage and server capacity) over the Internet and "on demand." It relies on virtualization software, which pools available computing resources from many servers, to provide that seemingly instant access to applications, storage or servers.
The reason cloud computing represents such a radical paradigm shift for IT is because of this instant access to scalable IT capabilities that it facilitates. The classic example of this concept is the time it takes to provision a server for a new application. In a traditional corporate IT environment, this process can take weeks: A new server may need to be purchased. Once purchased it needs to be configured and software has to be deployed for it.
In a cloud environment, the server capacity is already in place, and it's virtual. Instead of weeks, it can take minutes to get a server running. The process of provisioning a server to run an app is almost entirely automated, and users only pay for the computing capacity they use, as opposed to paying for all of the capacity that an entire physical server provides.
Cloud computing differs from traditional IT in several other ways. It presents new problems and therefore requires new approaches to solving those problems. For example, when Rackspace began to develop monitoring services for its cloud customers, it looked to traditional IT management and monitoring tools from several major vendors. Fafel says Rackspace quickly realized that those tools, which are designed for enterprises in which there's a known set of users and are managed in a centralized fashion, didn't work in a multitenant cloud environment. Rackspace ultimately decided to use monitoring software from a small cloud company, CloudKick, which it later acquired.
"As you're evaluating solutions to build within the cloud and work within the cloud, you have to be open to looking at startup companies that are just getting off the ground," says Fafel. "That's a hard pill to swallow for many IT leaders."
Select Areas of Specialization and Certifications
IT professionals who understand the concept of cloud computing, its different deployment models and use cases will be able to speak confidently about how their organizations might take advantage of the cloud and the benefits they might derive from it. Talking about cloud computing inside their IT organizations will distinguish them as knowledgeable and can help get them moved onto cloud computing projects, says Golden.
He recommends IT professionals learn about cloud computing's hot areas, such as platform-as-a-service (and Cloud Foundry in particular) and non-relational database management systems such as NoSQL, Apache's CouchDB and Cassandra databases, and Mongo. He also urges IT professionals to learn how to manage cloud infrastructure services environments and the management frameworks that sit around them, whether BMC or RightScale, for example.
All of these recommendations may seem overwhelming. The good news is that resources for you to educate yourself abound.
"It's dead easy to learn those things," says Golden, "because they all have online versions that are dirt cheap."
Indeed, many vendors in the vast cloud computing ecosystem, including Rackspace, Eucalyptus, RightScale, enStratus and Opscode, offer in-person or online training courses, documentation, white papers, demos, webinars and other resources on their Websites. These resources are often free for customers and partners. Sometimes they're free to the public or available for a low cost.
"Most everything an IT professional would need these days is freely available or relatively inexpensive," says Rackspace's Fafel. "You don't need a $5,000 server to help you learn. Launch your Web browser, launch a few servers in the Rackspace cloud, dig into blogs, and absorb as much information as you can."
As you build your knowledge of cloud computing, Eucalyptus's Knosp suggests investigating and obtaining certifications. He said he believes that when employers advertise positions for cloud administrators and architects, they will seek candidates with vendor-specific certifications. IT professionals who hold those credentials will be in a better competitive position in the job market.
(Courtesy: Meridith Levinson, CIO)
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