Indeed Report Finds Kubernetes Job Market Hot
A new report from online job-search site Indeed finds IT professionals with the skills required to manage Kubernetes container orchestration software is now the single-most searched topic on the company’s site.
Andrew Flowers, an economist for Indeed, says Kubernetes job searches rose 173 percent from last year, when Kubernetes ranked 11th overall.
Most of those job searches appear to be driven by IT vendors looking for people with Kubernetes expertise. The top five companies ranked by looking for job candidates with Kubernetes expertise were Microsoft, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle and VMware. Other notable end user IT organizations that made the top 23 list include Comcast, Capital One, Verizon, State Street and United Health Group.
Flowers says the results indicate there is an increase in demand for Kubernetes skills and a hefty inventory of jobs. But, given the challenges associated with acquiring Kubernetes certifications, it’s safe to say demand currently is exceeding supply. In addition to cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and GoDaddy, traditional IT services providers such as Capgemini and Deloitte also ranked among the top 23 employers looking for Kubernetes expertise.
Much of the dichotomy on the demand side of the Kubernetes equation comes down to how IT organizations decide how they want to consume Kubernetes. In many cases, because they lack internal Kubernetes expertise, many organizations are opting to rely on managed Kubernetes services provided by either a cloud service provider or an external IT services provider.
But as adoption of Kubernetes continues to grow, it’s now only a matter of time before internal IT organizations start looking for more Kubernetes expertise. In fact, many of them are investing heavily in training their existing IT staffs on best practices involving deploying, securing and managing Kubernetes. Many of them are discovering it’s a lot easier to provision Kubernetes, but managing large numbers of Kubernetes clusters is still complex, especially as organizations wrestle with multiple versions of Kubernetes.
At the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 conference this week, many of the attendees will be getting their first hands-on exposure to professional Kubernetes training provided via the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes is quickly emerging as a de-facto standard that promises to drive the emergence of hybrid cloud computing scenarios that will span both public clouds and on-premises IT environments. A recent survey conducted by the CNCF found deployments of Kubernetes in production environments has increased 200 percent since December of last year. In some cases, Kubernetes clusters will be deployed on virtual machines. In other instances, bare-metal servers will be preferred. IT organizations will need to come to terms with the broad range of platforms that Kubernetes clusters will be deployed on. From a management perspective, each platform has its own special Kubernetes nuance.
Whatever the platform choice made, the one thing IT professionals can count on is that those among them who have Kubernetes skills will be enjoying salary premiums compared to their colleagues for a while to come.
