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Comment by auspex | Hacker News Reader

The skill sets needed for the three big cloud providers are very different. At a high level it seems the same... VMs, VPC, Firewalls etc. but they all are configured and managed differently on each platform.

You need the experience as an AWS, GCP or Azure expert.

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Not sure I buy it entirely. I've found that once you become an expert in a particular vendors technology to the point you have a reasonably complete mental model on how it works and how to solve all kinds of problems with it and the specific solutions tailored to specifc problems, then learning another vendors specific technology comes at deep, deep, discount.

Tbh if you are an expert in X and I need you for Y and Y is analogous to X and there is time allowed for ramp up, then it's all the same to me.

Then it's disturbing that they're so non-standardized. I personally wouldn't want to spend a bunch of time becoming an expert in a skill that only applies to one company's physical servers.

Why would they standardise? They see their way of doing things as their competitive advantage - they each think their approach is better.

Maybe you don’t understand how much people spend on these services? If you’re spending a million dollars a month on AWS then it pays to have a few people who focus on AWS full time and know it intimately.

I really don’t think you need to let yourself get disturbed by this.

If we can learn anything from history, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the standardization. Just look at situation on the operating system side. Different flavors of Unix, VMS, z/OS, Windows. Sure there are concepts that apply to all of them, but if you want to be an expert you really need to go deep on the vendor specific things.

Anecdotal: my cousin is a sysadmin and he recently took a certification class for z/OS. He says it was probably the best career-enhancing step he's ever made.

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