why am i receiving this?

Every week we review AWS market trends; who is hiring for what, which roles and positions are most in demand, and where growth is likely to take place in the near future; subscribe to stay up to date.

You likely singed up through LinkedIn, or you've had a discussion with Joel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelproctor/) and expressed interest in getting access.

...and why exactly should I care?

These insights are intended to show you where the opportunity in the AWS marketplace lie,

For solution architects or managers, it might help you decide on product direction service - should I choose service A or B?

For agencies it might help you price your rates more effectively - how much more should I charge for candidates with skills X vs skills Y?

making sense of the data

While demand for AWS professionals remains high, we are seeing downgrades on the expected growth of AWS revenues; to borrow a phrase from Jamin Ball (see his newsletter, Clouded Judgment on Substack for more great insights) “this feels more like a “de-risking” of guidance than it does something to be concerned about”. I tend to agree.

AWS currently has 239 services, but we thought it easiest to group services into roles using AWS’ certification paths as a guide.

• serverless-engineers
• finops-engineers
• devops-engineers
• solution-architects
• data-engineers
• machine-learning-engineers
• security-engineers
• networking-engineers

Certainly there will be some overlap, but we make do.

sector growth rates

5 year growth rates remain strong, but like tech stocks this year, the labor market is getting hit hard; only professionals building serverless solutions saw positive 1 year growth; salaries also command a +15% premium, though with only ~1300 unique postings, it makes it a relatively small market compared to others.

top specialized skills for serverless architects

There is outsized demand, relative to supply, for the microservice, k8s, ci/cd, and terraform skills; this suggests practitioners should focus on honing these skills, and developers should focus on maturing capabilities in these areas to maximize their value.

top industries for serverless architects

Because the service-based business model operates with more overhead (margins are smaller compared to tech counterparts) often they have to command higher bill rates; this also means that to justify said bill rates they have to focus technologies newer to the market; think of them as the “adoption mechanism”. Given the most popular industries are professional services and technology firms, I would expect there to be a lot of opportunity for serverless professionals to focus on the small-to-medium sized enterprise market.

conclusions

The market is still hot, but cooling. Organizations in the US are adopting “horizonal” development models, as opposed to a “vertical” ones, and more cloud professionals will be expected to take an idea from experimentation through to production.

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