As stated by the LinkedIn Global Skillset Survey, cloud computing is the most critical skill that companies look for now. However, many IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders experience skill gaps, thus cannot realize the full potential of cloud, which is proven by the Gartner Annual I&O Leaders survey.
As of June 2021, LinkedIn lists around 350,000 unfilled cloud-related jobs in the USA alone. As a result, many businesses choose to entrust the development of their services to offshore cloud professionals. Finding cloud developers in outsourcing locations can bring you benefits, including faster and easier recruitment, lower costs for development services, and more.
But where can you find top cloud developers, and what skills should they possess? Let’s find out.
Where to look for top cloud developers: Eastern Europe
To satisfy the demand for cloud developers, many businesses opt for setting up a team in offshore locations, such as Eastern Europe. As of June 2021, LinkedIn lists over 106,000 cloud professionals in Eastern Europe. The three countries with the richest talent pool are Ukraine, Poland, and Romania.
Cloud developers in Ukraine
Ukraine is home to 15,000 AWS cloud developers, around 6,000 Google Cloud developers, and 7,600 Azure cloud developers. The overall talent pool in the country amounts to 192,000 professional software engineers.
Local developers are known for their exceptional skills and strong STEM-based education. Ukrainian software engineers are ranked 6th most skilled according to TopCoder and 5th by SkillValue.
There are nine top higher education institutions recognized by the Times Higher Education World University Ranking. What’s more, six universities are listed in the QS ranking.
Ukrainian cloud developers attend various cloud-related meetups and conferences. Events, such as DevRain Transform, AWS Discovery Day, let alone meetups hosted by Ukrainian IT vendors, take place in Ukraine.
Cloud developers in Poland
Poland boasts a talent pool of 15,000 Azure, 15,000 Amazon cloud developers, and 7,800 google cloud professionals.
Polish developers are also recognized by various rankings due to their skills. They are ranked 5th by the TopCoder and 3rd by SkillValue. It comes as no surprise, as the country boasts a strong computer science education. There are 16 top computer science institutes in the country, according to the Times Higher Education World University Ranking, as well as 15 recognized by the QS.
Cloud developers in Romania
The country with the third most significant number of cloud developers in Eastern Europe is Romania. There are 6,400 AWS cloud developers in Romania. The country is also home to 6,700 Azure professionals, and 2,100 Google Cloud developers.
Ten local HEIs are recognized by Times Higher Education World University Ranking and two by the QS ranking.
How to choose the best cloud developers
The tech stack of cloud developers differs between projects and depends on product complexity and specific requirements. However, cloud developers need to have a deep understanding of various hosting types, security principles, scalability, networking, etc.
When it comes to building a team for hosting your solution on the cloud, it should include the following experts:
- Solution architects: professionals that make critical decisions in terms of architecture;
- Tech lead: responsible for technical delivery and support of architecture decisions;
- Developers: responsible for the code development;
- DevOps professionals: accountable for infrastructure, security, load balancing, etc.;
- QA professionals: responsible for quality assurance in regards to functional and non-functional requirements.
For successful product delivery, your cloud developers need to have robust expertise in a number of tech domains. Let’s view these areas of expertise in more detail:
- Strong experience with key cloud vendors:
An experienced developer that works with the cloud should know the pros and cons of three main cloud vendors: AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Also, it is critical for them to be able to tell which cloud has the best services for solving a particular task.
Typically, when the Microsoft ecosystem is the basis for the product, Azure cloud provider is a decision to go, as it is an excellent opportunity to use Microsoft stack natively. For current best practices of containerized applications, the decision of cloud providers is based on cost-effectiveness and best fit for nonfunctional requirements.
Java and Javascript (Node.js stack) are usually supported by AWS and Google Cloud vendors.
- Cloud migration expertise:
Cloud migration goes hand in hand with a range of challenges. Thus, to overcome these difficulties, choose a vendor with enough capacity and experience to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud, cut infrastructure costs, and achieve more flexibility.
Learn how to build a cloud migration team
- Expertise in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS:
Notions of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) are critical when it comes to hosting your data on the cloud. And here is why:
IaaS provides computing resources, such as servers, operating system software, storage, networking infrastructure, data center space. Simply put, you rent physical IT infrastructure to build your own data center on the cloud instead of building a data center on-premises.
PaaS provides a cloud-based platform for developing, running, and managing applications. Your PaaS provider hosts servers, networks, storage, operating system software, and databases at its data center.
SaaS is a software solution in the cloud that can be accessed via the web or vendor APIs, typically for a fee (monthly or annual). A vendor fully manages SaaS apps and takes responsibility for the application, runtime, middleware, servers, storage, and networking. You are only in charge of data.
Learn more about SaaS development
Thus, your cloud developers should have strong experience with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS for successful cloud-related project delivery.
- DevOps expertise:
Your potential vendor should have solid DevOps expertise.
The vendor should help you to:
- understand what resources you are using (Audit);
- analyze what can be optimized and how to do it (Plan);
- monitor expenditures of IT cost (Implement);
- investigate new services aimed to reduce costs and optimize your infrastructure even further (Improve).
- Experience with containerization:
Containerisation technologies such as Open Container Initiative (OCI), RedHat CoreOS Rkt, or, Docker will help you make your application portable. Containers package all OS-level dependencies, runtime, libraries, and configuration and your application into one runnable image. In other words, containers can, with minor exceptions, be launched on almost any platform without customization of the host environment.
Containerization also increases workload density. Compared to Virtual Machines (VMs), containers are much more efficient in using compute resources resulting in cost and time optimization.
- Experience with orchestration:
Containerization on its own wouldn’t be nearly as valuable as with container orchestration engines. These runtime platforms allow running, coordinating, and managing the lifecycle of containerized workloads.
There are quite a few popular platforms that can run containerized workloads on different kinds of infrastructure, including public cloud IaaS, private clouds, or on-prem: Cloud Foundry, DC/OS (the Distributed Cloud Operating System), Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad, and, Kubernetes which became an industry standard.
Companies that benefited from cooperation with cloud developers
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Vable
Vable is an information management company based in the UK. Our client initially aimed at developing the newsletter solution for law firms. What started as a way to improve the exchange of legal information grew into a sophisticated platform for managing every aspect of current awareness.
Vable planned to launch a cloud platform based on the idea of their existing on-premise product to cover the greater scope of business cases and serve a wider audience. They needed a dedicated development team to build a new solution from scratch, implementing efficient technologies, including Angular 8, Java, Node.js, AWS, RabbitMQ, etc.
N-iX cloud developers applied AWS to develop cloud data services for the product. Our team uses a common practice, and we have multiple stacks on AWS that represent different environments.
Also, our specialists developed a DevOps framework on Ansible and Swarm, thanks to which the downtime was decreased to zero. Cloud services provisioning was migrated from manual mode to a modern provisioning tool - Terraform. All infrastructure is being constantly updated to the latest versions and approaches to avoid the usage of deprecated tools and software. And finally, we developed the new complex cloud solution for creating curated newsletters and monitoring their delivery through analytics.
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USA-based audio streaming platform (under NDA)
Our client decided to improve its legacy system and move it to AWS. They wanted to leverage the power of the cloud and obtain the benefits such as better availability, security, performance, and improved customer experience.
The main goals were to tackle various technical issues, support and enhance existing high-load APIs, and find flexible solutions to improve the platform. For example, they needed a new user subscription solution, as previously, all user-related information was stored in the on-premises data center and had performance issues.
The N-iX team helped the client to complete the end-to-end cloud transformation with migration to microservices. We migrated platform core functionality from Windows to Linux machines that now is managed by Kubernetes, which increased portability and greatly improved scalability. We also created a new subscription solution with updates in real-time, improved the usability of subscriptions, and added new features like Alexa Skill Account Linking that unified the subscription approach and simplified user experience.
Why hire cloud developers from N-iX?
- The company is a certified AWS Select Consulting Partner, a Microsoft gold certified partner, and a Google Cloud Platform Partner;
- N-iX complies with PCI DSS, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and GDPR standards to ensure maximum security of your data;
- N-iX offers DevOps services, including cloud adoption (architecture, migration, optimization), building and streamlining CI/CD processes, security issues detection/prevention (DDOS & intrusion), firewall-as-a-service, and others;
- We have broad data expertise to design different data solutions, including big data, data science, business intelligence, AI, and ML.
