CloudCast: Sun Breaks Possible
weekly overview - what’s new?
Welcome to our second issue of CloudCast. While some of the aggregate unique postings have dropped for AWS professionals, these changes are minimal compared to last week. FinOps is still hotter than ever though, so we are going to do a deep dive on skills sets in demand, in addition to covering some notable AWS feature releases.
notable aws releases
“AWS announces changes to AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account consoles permissions:
...The fine-grained actions launch enables customers to provide individuals in their organization access to only services that are necessary for their job. For example, with these new permissions a customer can provide a developer access to Budgets and Cost Explorer, while denying access to Bills or Tax Settings services”
“Amazon S3 Storage Lens introduces tiered pricing for cost-effective monitoring at scale:
…The first 25B objects are billed at $0.20, the next 75B at $0.16, and all objects beyond 100B at $0.12 per million objects monitored monthly…customers with hundreds of billions of objects will now see progressively lower prices, saving up to 40% on organization-wide storage monitoring.”
our take
We advocate for event based architectures wherever possible due to their dynamic nature. Often we need fine grained data to build the policies required to create the events in the first place, however. The changes to the billing permissions get us one step closer.
The S3 cost reduction is likely to only impact the larger AWS customers/users, but it’s nice to see features added that require minimal (or no) additional effort on our part.
sector growth rates
* no major changes from last weeks report
a deep dive into demand for finops professionals
We see this trend across all AWS professionals, but it’s worth mentioning the “median time to place” (i.e. median posting duration) is ~50% longer for AWS professionals, compared to US roles in aggregate; to put that into perspective, it takes almost a month to hire an AWS professional, when it takes only two weeks to fill an unrelated role. Those costs add up.
Wages are a little tricky to analyze, given (1) their small sample size and (2) the averaging across regions, but what is useful is to compare their relative value to other cloud professionals.
For example, if the data in aggregate show role A has a 10% premium on role B, and salary data locally denotes a 100k salary for role B, then we can assume a fair price for role A, locally, would be 110k. Finops roles are currently the 3rd most expensive, though I would expect this to increase as a greater share of technical users make their way into the labor pool.
While remote work is popular, we see the following states the most active for FinOps professionals:
Within the software skill sets, large supply gaps exist for Cloudformation, Python, Ansible, and Terraform, This suggests automation, first via the AWS SDK and second via IaC, is a large need for organizations; this tracks with the FinOps Foundations finding that the #1 FinOps tool for most organizations is “homegrown”.
conclusions
Economic headwinds are causing folks to look at their IT spend more closely; while it is tempting to use the stick instead of the carrot, we urge folks to look at their infrastructure like a stock portfolio, with individual services akin to your ticker selection. And just like a stock portfolio, the question is not “where do we decrease costs?”, the question is “where do we allocate our funds to maximize our returns?”
That means not only “where do you decrease spend?” but also “where do you increase spend?”.
up next week
Next week we’ll be sharing some of our favorite open source tools to help you on your journey to automate cloud management, but if there’s something you’d prefer we cover instead, shoot us a note! newsletter@bluearch.io