CloudCast: Still sunny. Still cold.
weekly overview - what’s new?
Welcome to another issue of CloudCast. Diving right into the data for January, we have some notable highlights:
Marginal decreases (<0.10%) in open role quantities for Serverless, FinOps, Networking, and Machine Learning Engineers.
Median salary for AWS DevOps Engineers increased +1.18% in January
Open roles for AWS Data Engineers increased a whopping +10.49% in January
(those of you who aren’t following @joe reis 🤓 on LinkedIn… maybe now is a good time 😉)Median salaries for AWS Data Engineers saw a +3.68% increase in January
Median salaries for AWS Security Engineers saw a +2.00% increase in January
Though his report is slightly dated, these data are mostly consistent with Sai Senthilkumar’s findings in his covering of trends in the data and ML ecosystem (@Sai).
“... Data budgets have meaningfully increased in the past couple of years. I surveyed 60 data leaders in our network within organizations of 500+ FTEs, and nearly ~50% of the enterprises have a data-specific budget greater than $1M…some data leaders in charge of $10M+ budgets. Looking ahead, data budgets will continue to expand, with ~25% of enterprises at least doubling their data spend in the next 10 years.”
notable aws releases
“SKU pricing rules for AWS Billing Conductor
…Using SKU pricing rules, customers can change the rate for any resource running in their environment. For example, an AWS partner can use a SKU pricing rule to give a specific discount to their customer(s) for all c5.2xl EC2 instances running in us-east-1. Another use case could have an internal Cloud Center of Excellence team give a specific discount to their teams on EC2…”
our take
We often preach about the importance of incentives; being able to interact with infrastructure data at a more granular (SKU) level provides improved automation capabilities to Data and FinOps Engineers alike.
a deep dive into demand on data engineers
Python continues to remain popular amongst data professionals and architects alike.
The supply deficit relative to demand for skillsets surrounding Kinesis suggests the needs for streaming data are increasing
Transportation and warehousing is the second most popular industry for Data Engineers by demand; could this demand be driven by all the “Uber for X” companies?
conclusion
A gentleman purchased a bread manufacturing business. His first act as CEO? Close the manufacturing plants in the less expensive rural regions and open new plants in more expensive urban areas. People thought he was crazy - "The new plants are going to bankrupt us!" they screamed. “We’re not in the bread business…,” he replied. “We’re in the transportation business”.
Forgive the half-baked story, but we couldn’t help but draw parallels between this story and the FinOps industry. FinOps is fundamentally about architecture, sure, but building and automating cloud governance best practices are data engineering problems. That is where the current value is unlocked, and it is worth paying attention to tools and trends in the space.