Why look at jobs before learning
It is easier to stay motivated when you know what employers actually ask for. We read cloud and DevOps adverts from Ghanaian banks, telcos, fintechs and software firms, plus remote roles open to Africa based applicants, and noted which skills appeared. This lesson shares what we found, honestly.
The job titles you will see
- Cloud engineer or cloud support engineer: builds and looks after an organisation's cloud accounts, servers and storage.
- DevOps engineer: builds the pipelines that test and deploy code, and the tools developers use every day.
- Infrastructure or systems engineer: looks after servers, networks and backups, whether in the cloud or in a data centre.
- Site reliability engineer (SRE): keeps services fast and available, measures reliability and leads the response when things break.
Large companies split these roles; small ones expect one person to do a bit of everything.
What the adverts ask for
Across the adverts we read, the same skills came up again and again: at least one cloud platform (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud), pipelines for continuous integration and delivery, containers with Docker, infrastructure as code with tools such as Terraform, Linux, scripting in Bash or Python, and monitoring. Banks and telcos also stressed security and access control. Every one of these has a lesson in this track.