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Tag: technology skills

  • 4 Tips To Plug The Cloud IT Skills Gap

    4 Tips To Plug The Cloud IT Skills Gap

    Technical talent is few and far between. The programming world faces a developer shortage, and with this shortage comes a lack of cloud know-how. By now, most organizations have become multi-cloud, yet 86% of IT professionals believe a lack of these skills will slow down cloud projects.

    As more teams transition from older architectures to cloud environments, the IT skills gap could pose a severe bottleneck to software development and deployment. Cloud servers require ongoing maintenance, and managing security and compliance is challenging, even for seasoned developers. Furthermore, it’s easy to overspend in the cloud—without keen insight into vendor nuances, it becomes challenging to select the most cost-effective package for the application at hand.

    I recently talked with Joe Spurrier, chief technology officer and co-founder, cloudtamer.io, to see how teams can improve their cloud strategies while navigating a short supply of IT cloud know-how. According to Spurrier, increasing automation, sharing reusable templates, centralizing best practices and maintaining agnosticism are strategies to amplify cloud results. Below, we’ll expand on these areas to see how they maximize cloud benefits while retaining a lean engineering footprint.

    Automation, Automation, Automation

    “Automation is key to furthering your adoption and use of the cloud,” said Spurrier. The drive to automate comes as no surprise to many DevOps and SRE professionals whose goal is to automate their job away. When automating the cloud, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a fundamental necessity. “If you’re getting into cloud, you should probably have some scripting skills,” said Spurrier.

    Automation can significantly aid scalability when setting up additional accounts since engineers must replicate similar operations, such as server provisioning, deployment patterns, monitoring and so on. Automation is also essential for shift-left testing and to increase observability into production environments. “It’s one thing to deploy an application via automation, but another to have tests in automation—that’s the next level,” said Spurrier.

    Now that so many tools are API-driven, orchestration becomes programmable. A cloud service provider’s CLIs or SDKs could also be leveraged to hook into these integrations to construct such automation.

    On the flip side, too much automation for high-level privileges could backfire. “Someone could break into a data center, steal a server, disconnect it, then run off,” Spurrier explained. Thus, automation will require a higher sense of security to ensure that every change is appropriately authorized and logged.

    Reusable Templating

    Along with automation, documenting operational processes to be shared amongst engineering teams is vital for maximizing efficiency in a lean talent landscape. The key here is to make the process self-documenting and reusable, stresses Spurrier. This will most likely involve someone on the team creating shared libraries and repositories for other team members to leverage.

    One such example is Amazon’s golden AMI pipeline. Golden AMIs are virtual machines that teams can “standardize through configuration, consistent security patching and hardening.” Golden AMIs can also enable a repeatable process for performing monitoring, logging and even distribution to business units.

    Reusable patterns are important for building CI/CD systems so that when you commit code, it is automatically deployed to preferred cloud providers. In general, Spurrier recommends building shared repositories that are easy to clone, with step-by-step instructions for usage. Sample applications that demonstrate components in different languages can also aid developer usability and save time.

    Adopt Centers of Cloud Excellence

    Another way to encourage better adoption is by creating a center of cloud excellence (CoCE). For an enterprise, having a cloud-centric project management group can be very helpful to organize knowledge and offer support. A CoCE could centralize operations, supply engineers with pre-configured containers and help distribute access to cloud accounts.

    A CoCE is a good way to start to unite disparate teams around shared best practices, said Spurrier. Depending on your organization’s needs and workloads, a CoCE will focus on varying skills, he added. In the beginning, a company may have just one center for cloud knowledge. However, as adoption grows, dedicated centers may likely emerge around specific cloud providers, too.

    Retain Agnosticism

    Contrary to popular belief, multi-cloud steups aren’t always about lift and shift. Business units often adopt a particular cloud to suit specific workload requirements. For example, researchers may choose GCP for its data science functions, or Microsoft shops may prefer Azure.

    In a multi-cloud world, management layers could help retain a modicum of vendor neutrality. For example, take Cloud Custodian, a tool developed at Capitol One and recently contributed to the CNCF. Using Cloud Custodian, engineers can run security checks across AWS, Azure and GCP and generate metrics for reporting. Such control and insights could empower teams to automate some of the multi-cloud management burdens.

    When working with multi-cloud, it’s also good to consider agnostic tooling that can work across different providers, like Terraform or Kubernetes, Spurrier said.

    Templating

    Cloud transformation is ongoing at most organizations. With this rise, more cloud-native processes and tools are emerging. Yet, with talent in short supply, DevOps isn’t always fully prepared. To review, we covered four ways businesses can circumnavigate this issue to get an edge:

    • Increased cloud automation is a necessary response to a slimmer labor pool. Though building automation requires upfront technical skill, it pays dividends in increased efficiencies.
    • Reusable libraries and templates can rapidly configure new projects and do so consistently across business units.
    • Consider maintaining a center of cloud excellence to centralize policies and offer support.
    • Opt for agnostic tools. This helps to retain vendor neutrality and apply consistent controls across clouds.

    Of these above strategies, Spurrier emphasized the importance of creating shared templates. When used right, a templating approach can be very effective, he says. “If you have a templating model, it should be easy for DevOps teams to migrate to new features. If you’re leveraging tools that set up templates, it’s easier to figure out how much infrastructure is going to cost.”

  • Five Tips for Solving the Technology Skills Gap

    Five Tips for Solving the Technology Skills Gap

    The insightful, and sometimes breathless, predictions regarding digital transformation are everywhere. We are right to be mindful of both the potential and the challenges posed by digital transformation. Digital transformation is increasing the rate of change in every business, in every line of business and even in every role.  

    Digital transformation requires new development practices, organizational culture changes, customer intelligence and focus, empathy and, above all, new ways of thinking. Only when everyone is committed to improving the way work gets done, can an organization thrive in a competitive environment. As organizations continue to grapple with how to prepare their workforce for an increasingly digital world, they have a technology skills development problem.

    Below are five considerations for bridging the technology skills gap brought on by digital transformation.

    Identify the Skill or Development Problem You Are Trying to Solve

    It’s essential that the technology skills development program be aligned in purpose and design with the intended business objective. That may sound obvious, but organizations have a way of accelerating beyond the original scope and intentions. 

    Ultimately, what you are trying to do will determine the combination of tools, content and even organizational commitment needed to be successful. For instance, are you trying to deepen technical knowledge for a set of employees? Or, are you tasked with improving specific performance objectives in data, DevOps and/or security?

    Before investing in training, it’s important to establish the targeted employees, the range of competencies to be covered, the degree of proficiency required and the time frame to complete the initiative. In all cases, build a program that can solve the problem in a time frame that meets the business needs.

    Establish the Performance Objective 

    For nearly all technology skill problems, the goal is performance: the target learners becoming sufficiently competent to perform at the required level. Understanding what the performance standard or measure of success is or will be helps focus all stakeholders on the same goal.    

    If specific performance objectives are required, monitoring a specific key performance indicator (KPI) can be the most valuable approach to determining training success or impact. If the KPIs are not available, using post-assessments can be a useful measure of knowledge gained and can help demonstrate the impact of the training.   

    Leverage Authoritative Content

    It’s important to understand the sources used to create the course material as well as who authored or collaborated on the material. This matters not just because the learning content should be accurate, but also because adult learners are sensitive to the credibility of the source material. Especially in technical areas, IT professionals expect to be provided with material from authoritative sources.

    IT professionals consider current practitioners, or well-known consultants the most authoritative voices on how to use technology. In some cases, industry associations or trade groups have established themselves as authoritative sources in their specific technical areas. Regardless, the source material should be highly reputable and authoritative. 

    Put User Experience First 

    Making learning as convenient for the target learner as possible is essential to a successful learning program.  

    Convenience has often meant anytime/anywhere learning—learners can take courses at home, while commuting, from their desk or wherever they work. This experience should be much like watching a movie on Netflix or Hulu: Learners should be able to start the course at one location, on one device and continue it at another time on a different device from just the right point in the course. 

    Training can also be seamlessly incorporated into the workflow of some applications. Think of it like a more sophisticated, less annoying version of “Clippy,” the Microsoft assistant that provided in-context help for Microsoft Office through the mid-2000s. For some types of applications and technical roles, having a context-sensitive learning engine that can identify and serve up nuggets of learning appropriate to the task can be very useful. 

    Offer the Right Mix of Push Learning and Pull Learning 

    Employers are beginning to realize the benefits of pull learning where IT professionals identify and select their own learning paths. This model allows motivated professionals to acquire skills, gain more responsibilities and, in some cases, promotions and new job opportunities. Employers have realized that when employees self-select a course, it is a strong indicator of self-motivation, and a strong predictor of professional dedication and success.  

    But pull learning isn’t appropriate for every problem to be solved. For example, maybe you need a group to learn the same thing about cloud security or compliance. In such situations, it’s not practical to wait until the target learners are motivated to take the specific courses. It makes more sense to solve these challenges by assigning specific courses to the right groups of target learners, assigning completion dates and monitoring progress.  

    Depending on what problem you are trying to solve, either push learning or pull learning may be more appropriate. 

    Setting Your Organization Up for Success

    Ultimately, successfully navigating digital transformation requires a team with well-aligned IT roles and skill sets. People are the make-or-break element of a high-performing IT organization. There is simply no replacement for people with the right skills, attitudes and traits. CIOs don’t have the luxury of hiring a totally new roster of people with “the right stuff,” so they will have to be creative in using a combination of hiring, mentoring and training, contractors, and partners to create the needed mix of capabilities. 

    Once you have hired and trained the talent in your organization, what’s your plan to help them continue their learning journey for the duration of their career?

    — Mike Hendrickson