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Upskilling in Infrastructure Type Roles

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    Upskilling in Infrastructure Type Roles

    Almost finished studying for my 70-347 and 70-346 O365 exams - planning to take both in a week break I've got scheduled. I opted to do those purely because a friend of mine wants me to do an Office 365 migration for his rather large business, but they wanted someone certified...

    Anywho, once I'm done with those cerrs I really, really am torn on what to study for next. I've been having a play with Azure and I like it; it works, the interface is nice. I know nothing of AWS or Google Cloud and I don't really see many roles advertised for the latter, AWS market seems saturated. Anyone else in this predicament? Private Cloud stuff with VMware is still ticking along but I don't want to invest a lot of time and money in a skill I feel will be mostly obsolete in 5 years time.

    Anyone else stuck in the same situation wondering what skills to pick up next? I'm considering going down the MCSE: Messaging route and adding Skype for Business to my repertoire, but I really would be starting from scratch with that and haven't much experience in it.

    Any advice appreciated.

    #2
    Training not cheap (unless you're happy to read manuals). Certification even less so. Even worse the ones where the courses are mandatory...

    Not sure if its worth the outlay to be honest. Not often I've ever been asked for certifications.....
    Rhyddid i lofnod psychocandy!!!!

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      #3
      You got any demonstrable experience to back these bits of paper up?
      'CUK forum personality of 2011 - Winner - Yes really!!!!

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        #4
        Originally posted by mattfx View Post
        Anyone else stuck in the same situation wondering what skills to pick up next? I'm considering going down the MCSE: Messaging route and adding Skype for Business to my repertoire, but I really would be starting from scratch with that and haven't much experience in it.
        Skype for business is dead - its about to be rebranded again under MS Teams and there will be a lot of focus on the entire Teams portfolio ....
        merely at clientco for the entertainment

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          #5
          Certification is not really sought after or valued in my area (unix systems ops), but it is in some others, eg. Cicso. Regarding AWS, you could always buy some AWS infrastructure yourself to have a play. But clients will be looking for commercial experience IMO.

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            #6
            If you are a contractor, you should ask your friend, as he (and other personal contacts) are the only source of work you will get based solely on training/certs and no relevant experience.

            If you are a permiel, you should ask your manager.

            MS certs devaluation is faster than the £, everyone and their dog can get them with a couple of days cramming the exam dumps. Even without actual cheating, which is made quite possible with the introduction of the exams at home. Personally I stopped bothering after the greedy bitches made them expire.

            For similar reason never bothered with the VMWare certs. Ignoring the cost, cba wasting 5 days of billing or my weekends on a course to teach me something that I already know. If the client can't be convinced by my track record and a technical interview that I'm the right candidate and only relies on a cert, I probably don't want to work there.

            DevOps is all the rage atm so knowledge about tolls like octopusdeploy, puppet, chef, ansible, coupled with basic codding and infrastructure skills are in high demand.

            Cloud is vapor(ware), although it's on the rise, on-premise is cheaper for +80% of the use cases, so demand for VMWare/Hyper-V is not going away any time soon.

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              #7
              Azure ties in with O365 the best so I'd look at that.
              However the certificates were out of date 1 week after released and they are a few years old. O365 and Azure are changing weekly. IMO the certs are a total waste of time.

              If you can get a migration based on them then go for it, but use that project as the spring board. Make sure that you use Azure as much as possible during that migration and gain as much experience as you can. Building your ADFS systems in Azure may be exactly what you need.
              See You Next Tuesday

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                #8
                Originally posted by sal View Post

                Cloud is vapor(ware), although it's on the rise, on-premise is cheaper for +80% of the use cases, so demand for VMWare/Hyper-V is not going away any time soon.
                not any more it's not.

                Dev environments are almost free in the cloud and the devops tools are all there for you to use for a fraction of the cost of building your own.
                It may cost to move from on-prem to cloud but it's a saving in the long-run.

                If you've already got the hardware, especially if recently bought, then the business case for cloud is not so good. But if you need a refresh or are starting from scratch cloud is a no-brainer.
                See You Next Tuesday

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by Lance View Post
                  not any more it's not.

                  Dev environments are almost free in the cloud and the devops tools are all there for you to use for a fraction of the cost of building your own.
                  It may cost to move from on-prem to cloud but it's a saving in the long-run.

                  If you've already got the hardware, especially if recently bought, then the business case for cloud is not so good. But if you need a refresh or are starting from scratch cloud is a no-brainer.
                  It's all private cloud here, and you know what - it's utter wank. Promised 20min linux 'small server' spin-ups - two weeks - still waiting...

                  It's for a POC, ended up starting it on VMware Workstation on isolated network on my lappy. Trouble is, gonna need them soon, need to interface to existing AD/Centrify, my laptop (and brain) cannae take all that...

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by Lance View Post
                    not any more it's not.

                    Dev environments are almost free in the cloud and the devops tools are all there for you to use for a fraction of the cost of building your own.
                    It may cost to move from on-prem to cloud but it's a saving in the long-run.

                    If you've already got the hardware, especially if recently bought, then the business case for cloud is not so good. But if you need a refresh or are starting from scratch cloud is a no-brainer.
                    Assuming we are both talking about Public cloud, as Private cloud is just a fancy wrapper around traditional virtualization, so the need for the underlying skills is still there.

                    Which public cloud provider is giving up free (or almost free) dev environments? Hope you are not talking about a hand full Azure credits that come with MSDN sub.

                    By the sound of it you are talking about web businesses, which are the biggest users of DevOps and Public cloud - they would be the 20% in my statement. For them the elasticity of the Public cloud is major factor and the reason for the economic case for using the cloud.

                    For the majority of the other businesses, where IT is not the business by itself and the demand for storage and compute is more or less static on-premise or a healthy mix of on-premise and public cloud is still much better and cheaper solution.

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