If you want to get ahead, get tooled up on microservices as vacancies for job roles have gone up by 133% over the last year, according to the latest report from Rackspace.
Microservices, which enable applications to become more agile and prevent servers from being jammed, are becoming increasingly prevalent in a world of data overload. Think of the stat, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it at BUILD earlier this month, that 90% of the data in the world today have been created over the last two years, or the fact that 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and you get the idea of its importance.
It’s also forcing change in other areas, Rackspace argues. Job postings for agile software development, a fundamental skill in microservices, went up 16% over the past 12 months, while skills for more traditional service-orientated architecture (SOA) declined by 22%.
Skills with regard to container technologies continued to gain ground in the past year, with demand for engineers versed in Google Kubernetes going up an astonishing 919% since 2016, with Docker continuing to tick over nicely at 83%. The rise in Docker-related job postings had gone up 341% and 991% over the previous two years, so there is something of a slowdown.
“The demand for different technology skills, and consequently, the rise in new job roles are constantly evolving in the IT sector both in the UK and beyond,” said Darren Norfolk, managing director of Rackspace UK. “In 2015, we saw the number of cloud engineering roles grow dramatically, but now we’re seeing a demand for more nuanced, specific skills emerge.
“This will only become more pronounced as businesses expand and look for expertise to help manage different elements of their business,” he added. “Business leaders must be able to plan ahead and make sure they have skills in the right areas in order to benefit both the business going forward, and the employees who work in it.”
CloudTech’s 2017 examination of the key cloud skills needed for success, as provided by Firebrand Training, include database and big data skills, application security, enterprise cloud migration, cloud enterprise application development, as well as containers.