What skills do you need to choose the right cloud platform?

To choose the right cloud platform, you need a combination of technical skills such as understanding of cloud architecture, security, networking, and scalability, as well as soft skills like strategic thinking, problem-solving, and the ability to align business requirements with technology solutions.

3 / 3 Understanding the basics of cloud computing is essential for selecting the right platform. This includes knowing what cloud computing is, its workings, advantages, and challenges. Familiarity with terms like virtualization, containers, and automation is crucial. This knowledge will guide you in setting your goals and choosing the best options.

When you start to use a cloud platform, do not make assumptions, read thoroughly and get to know about how this particular cloud vendor handles traffic, data, API, load balancing, data storage aspects - it may not be same as the one you previously used in the same job or prior one. Serverless computing is offered by all 3 major cloud vendors, but each has its own way of executing, and making it optimized for more API calls or transactions per second. Under how the Load balancer handles new addition of nodes, how does it "scale in" when off business hours or less demanding season.

Choosing the right cloud platform requires a combination of technical and non-technical skills. Here’s a list to guide you: 1. Cloud Platform Knowledge: Understand the features and offerings of major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) to make informed decisions. 2. Technical Expertise: Possess strong technical skills in areas like networking, security, databases, and infrastructure, tailored to the chosen cloud platform. 3. Cost Management: Develop the ability to analyze and manage costs effectively, optimizing resource usage and selecting cost-efficient services. 4. Scalability Planning: Understand how to design and implement scalable solutions that align with your project’s

Understanding each of the cloud resource and its workings is the first step to get more out of your investments. Second step is to understand the pricing tiers and each of it's SLA. In one instance, we had a SQL Db in Azure that was costing us higher than other dbs, on further inspection, we noticed that there were additional High availability replicas and "hybrid benefit" was not applied, after reducing the replicas and applying existing SQL license benefit, the monthly bill came down a lot. Another instance, we had made Azure Function app to be in premium tier for doing Load tests, after it was completed in few days, it wasn't scaled down to consumption plan, costing us unnecessarily. Also avoid cross-region data transfer costs.

There are several cloud resources that determine the security of your cloud based solution. It could be the traffic manager, load balancer, and API gateway, to name a short list. The TLS version has to be set to 1.2 and also weaker ciphers must be disabled, enable only few strong cipher suites. This goes a long way in protecting your cloud-native solutions and products. It improves the robustness of your TLS traffic, and makes it harder for hackers to crack your data exchanges. We found some of the weak ciphers were enabled by default by Azure for App gateway, we wrote a script to periodically check the enabled cipher suites and disable those that are weak.

From my perspective to choose the right cloud platform also you have to evaluate and put some key points In the balance. So, sometimes you will lose something from the skills previously mentioned and sometimes you will win another thing. For example if your team is only built for developers and there is a lack of knowledge in other areas like devops, networking, etc. I would go with a cloud that help me to give a better experience for developers, meaning that the developers can be able to deliver value with small effort.