What is a cloud engineer?
Cloud engineering is a multi-disciplinary practice of creating efficient cloud-based solutions for companies. The field draws from many skill areas, including information technology, systems, and service engineering.
The cloud is a network of servers that allows users to access services and software via the internet instead of their computers. Cloud engineers are the people who build, maintain, and troubleshoot the cloud computing environment or infrastructure. Cloud engineer is an umbrella term for the various roles involved in working on the cloud such as cloud architect, cloud systems engineer, and cloud software engineer.
Cloud engineers and other IT professionals rely on cloud computing platforms for their cloud architecture and infrastructure. In addition to cloud computing services, these products typically allow for storage, application management, and performance tracking.
Types of cloud engineers
At smaller companies, cloud engineering duties might fall to one employee who serves multiple functions. On the other hand, enterprises might divvy up roles and responsibilities to:
- Cloud architects. Cloud architecture involves using different technology components, like hardware, software, databases, platforms, and applications, to form a cloud. The cloud architect designs, oversees, and maintains the integration of these components based on a company’s needs.
- Cloud system operations engineers. Once an architect has designed and created a company’s system, a system operations engineer, also known as a SysOps engineer, manages and streamlines processes. They also help control the flow of data to and from the cloud.
- Cloud developers. This role specializes in building software, apps, and programs for cloud computing systems. A type of software engineer, cloud developers must have granular programming skills and the ability to troubleshoot issues as needed.
Cloud engineer skills
Cloud engineers need solid knowledge of the three main types of cloud computing: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas). Cloud engineering also requires:
- System administration skills. Familiarity with using Linux, an open-source operating system, is essential for cloud engineers. Most major cloud solutions run Linux.
- Programming skills. Cloud engineers need a solid knowledge of programming and familiarity with programming languages, such as Ruby, SQL, and Python.
- Cloud security skills. Cloud engineers should know strategies to defend against common cloud security issues like data breaches, identity mismanagement, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
- Problem-solving skills. Migrating a system to the cloud presents unique challenges, like interoperability issues, vulnerabilities, and outages. Cloud engineering professionals must have the analytical and problem-solving capabilities to prevent and troubleshoot problems.
- Leadership skills. Depending on the company, a cloud engineer may need to lead a team of other IT professionals, such as junior engineers. A cloud engineer benefits from having effective project management techniques, delegation capabilities, and facilitation skills.
Benefits of cloud engineering
Cloud engineering improves a company’s overall agility, its capacity to adapt to changes in the marketplace. Some specific advantages to cloud engineering include:
- Improves flexibility. Cloud engineers can configure the exact solution the company needs in real tomet and easily change it down the road. For example, they can add or drop terabytes of storage or use application programming interfaces (APIs) to facilitate communication between apps.
- Better mobility. Cloud solutions offer remote file sharing without device dependency. Employees can work from anywhere and still share data efficiently.
- Enhanced customer experience. With cloud-based data management, companies deliver a streamlined end-user experience across channels. Many cloud-based client relationship management (CRM) and customer experience (CX) software platforms exist via SaaS. With the help of cloud engineers, a company can select, integrate, and optimize these platforms to create a fast, meaningful customer experience.
- Boosted security. Cloud engineers help select the best cloud security options to protect data, improve identity and access management (IAM), and promote compliance.
- Seamless scalability. A company can easily add to its existing cloud infrastructure in times of growth – or scale back when necessary. Cloud engineers can select optimal data storage for the company’s needs, and since most cloud platforms are subscription-based, the company only has to pay for what they use.
- Easier collaboration. As a multidisciplinary field, cloud engineering relies on cooperation within the IT department. Employees from different cloud engineering sub-specialties, such as app development and system operations, work together to improve processes and make collective decisions.
Kelly Fiorini
Kelly Fiorini is a freelance writer for G2. After ten years as a teacher, Kelly now creates content for mostly B2B SaaS clients. In her free time, she’s usually reading, spilling coffee, walking her dogs, and trying to keep her plants alive. Kelly received her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Notre Dame and her Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Louisville.
