In Today’s Cloudbites:

📈 5 In-Demand Cloud Skills for 2024

🤖 Google’s Gemini Made a Big Mistake

🛠️ 5 AI Tools to Improve Your Productivity

🤫 PLUS: I Talked About Generative AI at Cloud Expo Europe!

Read time: 5 minutes

Hi friends, welcome back to Cloudbites

Today, I’ll be sharing the top 5 in-demand Cloud skills to kickstart your career in 2024. I’ll also share some AI news and tools that you can use to improve your work.

CLOUD COMPUTING ☁️

 📈 5 In-Demand Cloud Skills for 2024

2024 is the year where more businesses are moving into Cloud. With more career opportunities available, here are the 5 skills that I’d recommend building if you’re interested in getting into Cloud:

#1 Cloud Architecture

As more businesses begin to integrate Cloud solutions into their IT infrastructure, there’s more demand for people who have skills in designing effective Cloud architecture. 

Simply put, Cloud architecture is how a Cloud solution is designed by combining different Cloud tools and/or services. This Cloud solution will be used later on to address a certain issue.

To be proficient in Cloud architecture, you should master not only the fundamentals of cloud computing, but also understand the needs of your client (the business).

That way, you’ll be able to select the right Cloud tools and/or services to build solutions that are scalable, secure, cost-efficient, and high-performing.

#2 Cloud Security

Cloud security refers to the tracking, management, and securing of Cloud resources and data.

Recently, there have been many cyberthreats happening all over the world.

This has called for more professionals who could apply best security practices to the Cloud environment. 

Cloud security consists of ongoing evaluation and maintenance of Cloud services and tools, such as configuring, data classification and encryption, auditing, etc.

It also requires you to anticipate incidents via detecting, responding, reporting, and mitigating them.

#3 Cloud-Native Development

There has been an increasing pattern for organizations to run their software in a Cloud environment.

This makes the skills to build and deploy applications in the Cloud are becoming more prominent. 

Cloud-native development is about designing a software application to be developed, tested, and run in a certain Cloud environment.

Depending on the complexity of the software, you might also use micro-services architecture and/or AI.

In developing the software, you’ll also come across containerization, which is the packaging, distributing, and running of applications and their dependencies in ‘containers’ (isolated environments).

#4 Cloud Data Management

In today’s digital age, data is being generated an increasingly rapid speed.

Considering the overwhelming amount of data available, implementing an effective data management strategy can be challenging. 

That said, Cloud data management is about managing the data of an organization using a Cloud-based solution rather than focusing on managing the infrastructure.

One of the key features of effective Cloud data management is having a set of policies on secured data migration so the data can be used for many purposes to minimize the difficulties of having multiple data silos.

#5 DevOps (particularly the CI/CD pipelines)

DevOps itself is an approach to software development that consists of development, quality assurance, and technology operations to deliver reliable, cost-effective, and high-quality software.

Within the scope of DevOps, there is a subset called the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipelines that builds, tests, and deploys code to minimize human error. 

The CI/CD pipelines support DevOps to automate manual processes, such as infrastructure provisioning to make business operations more efficient.

Combined together, both of them are essential and are in high-demand to streamline development and deployment processes in the Cloud.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) 🤖

🤖 Google’s Gemini Made a Big Mistake

Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, has been reported for generating historically misleading images. 

Previously, Google was accused of being ‘racist’ because Gemini was only capable of generating pictures representing Caucasian people. 

As a result, Google has been trying to train its algorithm to identify different racial features and skin tones of people. 

However, it failed to consider certain cases where this should not happen, such as historical depictions.

For example, The Verge wrote a prompt on Gemini asking for a picture of a US senator from the 1800s.

Gemini returned the prompt by generating images of Black and Native American women as well as an Asian man—when the first US female senator was in fact a white woman; and she served in 1922.

The inaccuracies in the training data when building the algorithm resulted in false interpretation and image misrepresentation.

🛠️ 5 AI Tools to Improve Your Productivity

1. Bash: Transforms any information into practical and shareable action plans 

2. Contentful: Creates, manages, and delivers content across various digital channels

3. Cleo: Offers guidance for your personal finance

4. Coefficient: Imports and automatically syncs real-time data to Google Sheets or Excel

5. Rask AI: Translates videos and audios into 130+ languages and summarize lengthy videos into shorts

🤫 PLUS: I Talked About Generative AI at Cloud Expo Europe!

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking on stage and sharing “A Beginner’s Guide on Building Generative AI Applications in the Cloud” in London.

It was a great experience attending the conference and meeting fellow cloud enthusiasts.

I also had a few Tech With Lucy subscribers come up and say hi!

If you missed out on this year’s conference or would like to be involved in the future, register your conference interest for 2025 here.

THAT’S A WRAP

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Thanks for reading! 😊

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