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.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 18.44.19.png

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.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 18.44.40.png

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.

Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 18.47.34.png

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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