I get this question a lot: What’s the best cloud job this year? Followed by: Which cloud jobs pay the best? The same answer—data—applies to both questions, though with three variations.
Here’s my list of the three top cloud jobs for 2017 in terms of demand, pay, and job security.
1. Cloud architect
Always in demand, this person takes enterprise requirements, including existing applications and data sets, and finds the right set of public and/or private cloud technologies to meet those requirements.
To do this job, you must know a lot about cloud technology and how to configure it to meet the needs of the workloads set to be hosted on it. There aren't many of these people are around, thus the high demand and pay.
2. Cloud big data specialist
Moving from those who know a little about a lot of stuff (cloud architects) to those who know a great deal about a specific technology, we come to the cloud big data specialist. These people know a lot about big data, specifically about how you can implement big data in the cloud.
These people know about AWS RedShift and AWS Elastic MapReduce, as well as the big data technologies at Google and Microsoft Azure. The key criterion for this job is not only understanding the basics of big data but the specific technologies that have the right fit and where.
3. Cloud data-integration specialist
This job is the hardest to fill because you need to understand both cloud and noncloud data-integration technologies, as well as how to integrate cloud data and on-premises data.
The demand here comes from enterprises that are migrating data to the cloud and have not thought through how to sync data within and between cloud and on-premises systems. In 2017, enterprises will be scrambling to fill these jobs, and I suspect the folks who get hired will be data-integration engineers who also understand and have experience in the cloud.
I suspect all three jobs will remain hot in 2018—that’s the job security angle to these selections.