I.T. - Cloud, Big Data, Successfactors etc

[bigbadboss101]

Been doing some job searching and have seen a lot of these technologies/terminologies come up. Any of you guys familiar with these or if the company you work for used such? Where could one learn these aside from hands on experience on the job? I did some research and a few institutions came up however I am not sure if their cloud or big data certificates are recognized or are useful on a resume?

[Xtrema]

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Been doing some job searching and have seen a lot of these technologies/terminologies come up. Any of you guys familiar with these or if the company you work for used such? Where could one learn these aside from hands on experience on the job? I did some research and a few institutions came up however I am not sure if their cloud or big data certificates are recognized or are useful on a resume?

https://www.networkworld.com/article...s-vs-saas.html

Both Azure and AWS have free tier for you to test out these are IaaS. These are basically replacing onsite hardware.

Both have certification paths, much like the old MCSEs or CCNAs. Certification is better than nothing especially if you are new to it. But things and offerings are changing so fast and on top of other vendors that leverages on these platforms, it's hard to keep up even for people who are working it.

Successfactors is a HCM product, that's more of an application or SaaS. So if you know your ERPs, Successfactors shouldn't be hard to pick up.

Big Data like cloud is just another buzz word. It's just analytic tools and reporting services on your data.

[r3ccOs]

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https://www.networkworld.com/article...s-vs-saas.html

Both Azure and AWS have free tier for you to test out these are IaaS. These are basically replacing onsite hardware.

Both have certification paths, much like the old MCSEs or CCNAs. Certification is better than nothing especially if you are new to it. But things and offerings are changing so fast and on top of other vendors that leverages on these platforms, it's hard to keep up even for people who are working it.

Successfactors is a HCM product, that's more of an application or SaaS. So if you know your ERPs, Successfactors shouldn't be hard to pick up.

Big Data like cloud is just another buzz word. It's just analytic tools and reporting services on your data.

ISO 27001
Cloud - SaaS/PaaS/IaaS
DRaaS
Watson/Hadoop cloud offerings
Automation RPA BPA
Successfactors
S/4


glamor ware

[rage2]

I’m VP Cloud Operations at my work, so I’m pretty familiar with cloud offerings. We leverage AWS primarily and can give you pointers on what we look for when hiring.

AWS runs their AWSome day in Calgary once a year in June, it’s free and a great quick intro on what AWS offers. Most people see AWS simply as running their servers in the cloud (EC2) but that’s just a really small part of the puzzle. AWS has tons of cloud services that takes away the operational aspects of things such as databases, storage, in memory caches, and even goes beyond that with serverless compute so you can design and run an application without having to run a single server. On top of that, you can literally automate every piece of infrastructure or service operations to self heal your applications, and escalate anything that can’t be automated. AWS introduces new services very regularly so you never stop learning. Go build a wordpress blog or some other software on the AWS free tier, that experience will be enough to get you in the door to build some real experience.

We’re 2.5 years into AWS already so our hiring needs are quite different than other. We don’t really care at all for certifications, but more of hands on experience even if you’re just fucking around on free tier, at a minimum exposed to EC2 and RDS with some experience in automating operational work. Most other shops are looking for people to move from the traditional data center model to running all their servers in EC2. An example of this is this forum itself. I moved beyond from a traditional 4 server setup (2 application servers, 2 database servers) into AWS EC2 leveraging auto scale to only run the hardware needed to sustain the current number of active users for the vbulletin code, EFS to handle file storage (attachments, custom code), ELB to manage load balancing and MySQL RDS to run my database as a service so I don’t manage a database server at all. This allowed us to cut costs by 75% compared to our old datacenter collocation model. This is what I see most companies looking for today.

That brings up another skill set, costs. AWS and other cloud providers can easily rack up silly costs, so we look for people that have a basic understanding of cost controls and optimizations to minimize your monthly bills. There are lots of creative things you can do to cut costs, I actually devised a scale method that cut our annual costs by $350k that nobody else has leveraged, and our AWS reps have used that model with their other customers to minimize their spend.

Security is another big asset. Even if you’re in traditional IT and have a network team manage networks and security, you will want to learn at least the basics to protect yourself from intrusions. Being on the cloud sitting on the internet makes you a huge target and one bad security group will fuck you over good.

Another interesting note, even though AWS is the big player in the cloud space, Alberta is mostly on Azure. Guessing a lot of companies here are Microsoft shops and the transition is easier to Azure than AWS. We weened ourselves off Microsoft SQL and onto an open source database years ago and that decision has been a godsend when it comes to costs, and why we chose AWS as our platform. The cost difference is astronomical, with Microsoft SQL being 5x costlier due to licensing costs. That’s huge when I’m spending 7 figures a year on databases. So if you’re looking for work here, you will have better odds with Azure experience today, but I predict that will change in the future.

Bit of verbal diarrhea here, feel free to ask any questions you might have and I’ll try and point you to the right direction. @Mibz went through this transition last 2 years, hopefully he can add to this as well.

[bigbadboss101]

Thanks guys, I will PM you individually! Rage I saw your post in the other thread last night, useful information! I went into AWE training yesterday before I started this thread and had a quick look and set up my training and certification account. Will get set up and tinker with it. Looked into CISSP and CSSP but looks like you also need the work experience to get the certification from ISC2.

[Neil4Speed]

Speaking on the HCM Successfactors side, this is definitely a hot skillset right now. Lots of big companies are moving from in house systems to something integrated with SF and its hard to find the right people to implement and provide the sustainment.

[Xtrema]

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Speaking on the HCM Successfactors side, this is definitely a hot skillset right now. Lots of big companies are moving from in house systems to something integrated with SF and its hard to find the right people to implement and provide the sustainment.

Just like any ERP, finding people that understanding the business and the tech is always harder.

For most Windows shops, SaaS is all about ADFS and security. The rest are just mapping current processes to new processes.

[timdog]

For AWS training I'm a big fan of https://acloud.guru/
great training with lots of labs, etc and constantly kept up to date.
If you can work for a service provider (Long View for example), even if you join as a server generalist or helpdesk or desktop support or whatever your area is now, it shouldnt be too hard to get exposed to cloud if you have the drive and express the interest.