What is Cloud and Why are Cloud Engineers in Demand?
Not so long ago, the only way to create IT infrastructure was to build a data center and place all physical hardware in it. However, this is a very expensive approach and businesses are striving to find a solution to lower the costs of IT infrastructure maintenance.
Why don’t we share or rent a facility for the data center and split the cost with other companies? Why don’t we increase hardware utilization by creating virtual machines and having several servers on the same physical machine? We have underutilized hardware, why don’t we allow other companies to create and use virtual machines on it and charge them for that? All these questions are trying to find answers for providing better hardware and infrastructure utilization, thus lowering the cost of ownership.
On the other side, some companies need IT infrastructure. From the moment they decide to create it until it is ready for usage, months if not years are needed. They need to build a facility, buy hardware, physical installation, network… What if they could just rent IT infrastructure with as much computing power as they need and start using it right away?
It is clear that there is supply and demand of IT infrastructure in the market and the current state of technology allows this kind of business. This is the moment where cloud providers come into play. They are companies with a massive amount of hardware and compute power all over the world, offering it for rent. A large number of companies are sharing providers’ infrastructure, making it cheaper than building their own. Even better, it is now affordable to have your own virtual data centers on all continents. Without cloud services, this is almost impossible for the majority of companies.
These are obvious reasons why companies are starting their business using cloud infrastructure and migrating their existing one on the cloud. If carefully planned, cloud infrastructure can bring substantial savings over the infrastructure on-premises. The keyword here is carefully planned, meaning it is very important to have qualified professionals that can create, migrate and maintain the cloud infrastructure. There is a shortage of this kind of professionals and they are in demand in the IT industry.
- Required skills and technologies:
- Computer networks (TCP/IP, subnets, routing, firewall)
- Virtualization
- Basic Linux administration
If you want to find out more about what our Cloud Department works on, feel free to explore.