Our guest on the podcast this week is Bernard Golden, CEO at Navica.

We discuss the similarities and differences between VMs, containers, and serverless computing.  A lot of organizations have optimized around VMs because they have a long history of virtualization and it’s what they understand. They’ve built a lot of processes around that. Then containers came around, and that was the hottest thing in cloud. Now serverless is here. VMs and serverless are still not highly standardized. Containers are more standardized and the orchestration is also moving towards standardization. Containers and serverless are development paradigms that the industry is starting to embrace. VM is not like a container. You can run containers within VMs but can’t run VM inside a container.

We also look at the skills gap in cloud computing today. There is a talent shortfall even in places like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who are looking for tactical skills in devops, cloud ops, security, and more. Head hunters are befuddled because they cannot find people with the expertise and specific skills they are looking for in cloud computing and the technologies are changing so fast that the problem gets worse every day. 81% of IT leaders report to be concerned about missing out on cloud advances, and talent is a major part of staying ahead. This is a unique time in IT where the pace of change is visibly accelerated. Innovations are compressed into much shorter timeframes. The next few years will be challenging because of the skills shortage.