SD Times article by Jason English
Cloud native technologies—with their malleable, modular microservice architectures—quickly generate transformative digital innovations that deliver high-demand customer capabilities and operational value breakthroughs.
But wait, how many Kubernetes experts do we have? We’ve got an industry-wide shortage of skilled software development and operations talent—and the complexity of cloud native development is exacerbating the problem. We’re not going to hire our way out of this mess!
Skill shortages stymie cloud native innovation
Even non-technical executives now understand the basic benefits of cloud native software. They know it has something to do with Kubernetes pushing out containers, so the resulting applications are more modular and take advantage of elastic cloud infrastructures.
There’s way more to it than that. The cloud native landscape is a beehive of open-source projects for configuration, networking, security, data handling, service mesh – at various maturity stages. There are also hundreds of vendors offering their development, management and support tools atop this ever-moving CN raft.
A developer’s learning curve is steep and continuous, since this year’s stack might no longer be relevant next year. Outsourcing is tough too, when the few consultants with a real knack for cloud native development are busy and expensive.
The only way to sustainably grow is through building cloud native development talent and capabilities from within, following the introduction and maturation of the space, as well as keeping tabs on the vendor and end user community at large.
While the market demand for digital offerings keeps doubling every couple years, IT budgets often get a budget belt-tightening as a reward for managing and scaling so much technology.
Smaller and leaner teams are expected to deliver twice the output with half the people. The need for specialized skill positions only increases as concepts like event-driven architecture, data lakehouses, real-time analytics, and zero-trust security policies turn into production-grade requirements.
