The cloud causes consternation for many tech pros, especially when it comes to running apps critical to a company’s performance. While the logical ‘safe’ bet is to house and run those apps and services locally, an increasing number of tech pros are choosing to run in the cloud. Cloud Foundry Foundation has published a report detailing cloud migration, and says most (by a really slight margin) “mission critical” apps are now deployed from the cloud. Some 51 percent of respondents to the organization's survey say they now operate important apps and services from the cloud, with 45 percent still opting for “legacy” stacks. Last year’s study found 44 percent were cloud-first, with 53 percent opting for legacy environments. It’s a genuine turning of the tide. This movement can be attributed to Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), and containers. Forty-one percent of respondents to the survey say they’re utilizing PaaS, with an additional 38 percent “evaluating” it. Meanwhile, 38 percent report using containerization for their important apps, with an added 43 percent taking a hard look at the technology. Serverless (the most tenuous technology of the bunch; it's exactly like regular server usage, only without worrying about resourcing) only has 15 percent of tech pros in this survey using it. An additional 36 percent are interested in it, but have no immediate plans to implement it.

Cloud Skills Pay Off

Cloud technologies also rank among the highest-paying skills in the most recent Dice Salary Survey: Amazon Redshift (earning an average of $125,090 annually), HANA (High Performance Analytical Application, which has an average annual income of $122,907), and PaaS ($122,967) all rank in the top ten. Unfortunately, the adoption of virtual environments is leading to a supply-demand issue for tech pros. Because so many companies are moving to the cloud, the demand for those knowledgeable in skills related to running apps and services from a virtual environment has bloomed. Tech pros have collectively risen to meet that demand, but that spike in talent is a likely cause of related salaries plateauing. The average PaaS salary is down 3.3 percent from last year, while other skills such as Cloudera, Cloudfront and Cloud Foundry itself have all seen their annual income for tech pros decline. Fortunately, these skills all pay well above the average tech pro salary of $93,244. As for what’s next, Cloud Foundry identifies microservices, serverless computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, continuous integration and deployment, and blockchain as those poised to become useful in the near future (but has, curiously, omitted security).