- Hey, so if you're brand
new to the industry, or if you're just looking to
upgrade your existing skillset, you've come across the cloud options that are available. And so now you're wondering which one should you focus
your efforts on learning? Should you pick one or
should you learn all of 'em? And that's what we're gonna
talk about in this video. Now, for those of you who are impatient, the short answer is AWS, unless you fall into one of
the specific circumstances that I'm gonna describe
in the video today. (upbeat music) Hey, what's up? I'm Will from DevOps for Developers. And we're talking about which
cloud providers you need to learn if you're learning
your first cloud provider. So the first thing that
we want to talk about is who are the leaders in this field? And you can look at this chart right here, and you can see AWS is pretty dominating with Azure coming at
20% and Google being 9%. And then we're not even gonna talk about anyone below those three. It's just not worth the effort because when you've got those three companies
leading the industry, anyone else in there just really, it doesn't matter what they do, right? And so AWS is obviously the leader, which makes it very compelling to make that your first
cloud provider to learn. We also wanna talk about the job salaries or the salaries that are available for those top three providers, right? 'Cause that's obviously gonna
influence your decision, assuming that the reason you have a job is to make money. So if we look at salaries, AWS, the average salary for a job that requires AWS skills ranges between 140 and $150,000. Azure, the range is
from 90,000 to $180,000. And Google is 134,000 to $174,000. So let's dig into that a little bit. AWS, 140 to 150K. That's a fairly tight range. Because AWS has been
doing this for so long, the skills are kind of a known factor in the skillset required. It's sort of just like washed itself out to like a standard salary range, and that's what you're seeing there. Azure's kind of interesting though because 90 to $180,000 is
a big, big salary range. And my suspicion of what's happening there is a lot of the companies that are moving to Azure Cloud are companies that had their
own Microsoft infrastructure in their own physical data center, and so then they start
migrating certain services over to Azure. Now, along with their own servers and their own data center, they had their own IT staff too. They had their Microsoft
Windows sys admins, which typically, like in the big scale of different things you
can do in the tech industry is towards the bottom of that range. So you have these people that aren't making top-end salaries, and then they add the Azure Cloud skills to their skillset, and
they got a little bump from their employer to do so. And that's why we're seeing
that huge range there, in my opinion. And then Google, 134 to $174,000. That top end is up there quite a bit, which might make it compelling. So let's talk about two things there. One, let's go back to the
Azure salary range real quick. If you happen to be one of
those Microsoft sys admins who added Azure skills and you're in that $90,000 range, my advice to you is to
start looking for a new job, not because your employer
has mistreated you or anything like. I'm not saying anything
bad about your employer, I'm just saying that
there's more money out there but the only way you're
gonna get that money is to go get a new job. An employer's not gonna
give you a $50,000 bump just because you ask for it. But you can negotiate for
a $50,000 higher salary when you're interviewing for a new job with someone who needs your skills. As a matter of fact, there's a whole nother
talk I should probably do just on negotiating for your salary, 'cause I'm willing to bet, like 9 out of 10 of y'all
watching this video left money on the table when you
negotiated for your salary if you negotiated for your salary at all. So if that's something you wanna see, let me know in the comments down below and I'd be happy to crank
out a video on that for you. The Google thing, 140 to
174K is pretty nice salary. That's good money. It might make it compelling for you but I would not go that route. I would go with AWS over GCP and here's the reason why. If we flip back over to this picture here, Google only has 9% of
the market share, right? And we're talking about Google competing with Microsoft, competing with Amazon. These guys are juggernauts. They are not satisfied with holding 9% of a multi-billion dollar industry. Now, you or I would be
more than happy with that but someone like Google is
not gonna be happy with that. So one of a couple things
is gonna happen there. Google is going to either
transition their cloud offering so that it hits a very,
very specific niche that they can market to and campaign to, and increase their profit margins. Or they might just drop
that product completely. That sounds like a huge statement there but they've done it in the past, and it's just the nature of their beast. They go into a market looking
to dominate that market and if they don't dominate it, they've got no interest
in staying there, right? So dropping their entire GCP platform is not out of the question based on the numbers that
we're seeing in that chart. So for that reason, I would not go pursue
Google Cloud certification or Google Cloud skills if that was my first choice in the cloud or my first entry into the cloud. I would stick with AWS. Now, there's some other factors here that might cause you to switch between AWS and one of the others. For example, if you're
learning cloud skills because your existing
employer is migrating stuff to the cloud, and you want
to stay with that employer, and you want to take
part of that migration, and learn those skills, whatever platform they're going to, learn those skills. Even if they chose something
like Oracle Cloud or IBM Cloud or Alibaba or whoever one
of those minor players are. Go learn that because you
wanna stay at this job, and you wanna be a part, and you wanna grow with the
company that you're with. Now, if you're learning those skills because you either don't have a job and you wanna get a job period, or you want to leave
your current position, and go take on a new role somewhere, I still recommend AWS being
the first cloud provider that you learn. One of the other things that
might influence that though is if you have a job where you have skills that are very Microsoft-specific, for example, if you're a .NET developer, then I might lean toward
Azure a little bit more because a lot of your .NET shops are gonna naturally
gravitate towards Azure whenever they move to the cloud, if they're not there already. The other influencing factor there is the type of company you wanna work for. Some companies migrate to
certain cloud providers for various reasons. For example, Microsoft-heavy shops, specifically industries like healthcare where they just have a
lot of Microsoft products. They've already got this investment in servers in their own data centers that are Microsoft Windows servers, and their staff, their IT staff is already well versed in Microsoft, and they have this huge Active
Directory infrastructure, and Microsoft Azure is built specifically to work with that type of migration. So those guys migrate towards Azure just because it's a better
fit for their infrastructure and their environment, and
their existing skillset. So if something like healthcare or something like a corporation that has a traditional corporate structure that leverages Active
Directory very heavily is the type of job you're pursuing, Azure's gonna be a stronger
candidate for you than AWS is. And that's something you really
wanna think about, right? 'Cause if you're looking for a new job, just getting your first job or just looking to put
yourself in a better position at your existing job, you wanna put yourself in
the best position possible, and the skills that you choose to learn are a really good way to
influence that position as much as you can. And it's not like a
lifetime commitment here. If you learn AWS only to find out later that you need to learn Azure, you're not reinventing the wheel. All of these guys have
the exact same offerings for the most part. They all have the ability
to launch virtual machines. They all have functions as a service. They all have managed Kubernetes service. They all have blob storage file systems. They all have managed database services, managed caching services. All that kind of stuff. The only thing that really changes is whatever they named
that particular product, and then there's some differences in how you access it, and
how you orchestrate it, whether you use the GUI or their CLI tools or their APIs. That's gonna change a little bit. The overall product offerings themselves aren't gonna change. One place that it does
get a little bit different is in security, and authorization, and access controls like that. But nobody cares about that anyway. Just open it to everyone
and we'll figure it out. I'm just kidding, by the way. I'm really, really just kidding. Don't do that. But that is one of the places where you're gonna have to
learn the different providers and how each providers handles that, but in the overall big scheme of all the product offerings they have, it's not really a huge
insurmountable task. All right, so if you don't
have any preconditions or scenarios that set you
towards one particular provider over another, I recommend AWS. If you do have one of those
preexisting conditions, like working with your existing employer or going into an industry that favors one cloud
provider over another, or you're trying to leverage
some existing skills that you have that point you to one cloud provider or another, follow that instead of AWS, it that doesn't point you to AWS anyway. Hope you found that helpful. While I've still got you here, go ahead and keep scrolling down to find your next video but I did release a book called
"The DevOps Career Guide," and we talk about cloud providers in this, along with a lot of the
others technical skills that you're gonna need to
have a successful career in DevOps, including the soft skills because soft skills are
a huge part of DevOps. You can get this on Amazon in Kindle or paperback copy. And I'll put a link in
the description below. And then I'll see y'all next time. (upbeat music)
