Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering

Cloud architecture, infrastructure design, systems engineering

Cloud and infrastructure engineering is the work that goes into building and maintaining the platforms that software runs on. In the era before cloud computing, this meant you had to buy physical servers, rack them in a data centre and manage that hardware yourself. All that’s changed now, and cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud offer the ability to rent capacity on demand and pay for what you use.

Cloud architecture refers to the way hardware, software and virtual resources work together to build cloud computing environments, ensuring that applications are optimised for scalability, security and cost-efficiency while operating on the cloud. This includes the user-facing elements or front end, which might mean web browsers or mobile apps, as well as the back end, which would be the servers, databases and storage that are hosted on the cloud.

Infrastructure engineers decide how applications are deployed, what’s the best approach to scaling them in relation to load, how data is stored and backed up, and how to make sure that the system recovers when something breaks. Being an infrastructure engineer requires a wide and flexible knowledge base, as the role sits at the intersection of networking, operating systems, security, and software engineering.

Perhaps because of the nature of the role, there is a high demand for infrastructure engineers and organisations often struggle to hire for it. Experienced cloud engineers are in high demand and the gap between supply and demand has been growing for several years, so it could represent an area with a lot of career opportunity.