This article is based on reporting originally published on TechTarget (techtarget.com).
Why AWS Automation Skills Are Rising in Demand
Automation has become a core competency for IT teams migrating to the cloud and adopting DevOps practices. As cloud adoption accelerates, the demand for engineers who can automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and deployment pipelines continues to outpace supply.
“Perhaps a direct reason for this is the more widely adopted principles and practices of DevOps,” said Scott Thomson, director of public cloud at Softchoice, an IT consulting and managed services provider based in Toronto.
DevOps has evolved from a grassroots, department-level initiative into a mainstream enterprise practice. According to the Puppet Labs 2017 State of DevOps Report, the proportion of IT professionals working on DevOps teams grew from 16% in 2014 to 27% in 2017, reflecting how rapidly the discipline has spread across organizations.
Within DevOps workflows, automation is used to orchestrate continuous testing, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and the configuration of cloud resources and environments. This reduces manual effort and accelerates release cycles.
“The benefit of automating anything is to reduce the time and effort required to complete a set of tasks. At scale, this can save organizations months’ worth of man-hours a year, which results in direct savings in the form of greater productivity.”
Scott Thomson, Director of Public Cloud, Softchoice
DevOps Requires Both Technical Skills and Cultural Change
Adopting AWS automation skills is only part of a successful DevOps transformation. The traditional model of software delivery maintains a hard separation between developers and IT operations teams. DevOps breaks down those silos, requiring cross-functional collaboration and shared ownership of both code and infrastructure.
This cultural shift creates a need for new organizational roles — not just engineers who can write automation scripts, but also people who can guide teams through the transformation itself.
New IT Roles Emerging Around Automation
Thomson identifies two distinct categories of new roles that DevOps-driven organizations need to fill:
- DevOps Evangelist or Coach: This role focuses on the cultural side of DevOps adoption. Evangelists advocate for collaboration, shared responsibility, and continuous improvement across development and operations teams. They help organizations overcome resistance to change.
- Automation Architect: Unlike the evangelist, the automation architect is deeply technical. They design, evaluate, and implement automation strategies — including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code patterns, and configuration management frameworks.
Legacy IT shops transitioning to public or private cloud also encounter software-defined networking (SDN), another domain that relies heavily on automation. Adapting staff skills and roles to support SDN is increasingly common as networks become programmable.
Fortunately, the skills gap is not always as wide as it appears. Cloud administrators who already understand scripting can often build on that foundation to acquire AWS automation skills.
“All they need is the APIs for SDN, and they need to learn the toolkit, namely Chef and Puppet.”
Chris Gardner, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
AWS Automation Skills in Multicloud Deployments
Automation is equally critical in multicloud environments, where workloads are distributed across two or more public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Managing these environments manually at scale is impractical, making automation tooling essential.
A key advantage for multicloud teams is that popular third-party configuration management tools — particularly Chef and Puppet — are designed to be cloud-agnostic. This means engineering teams can apply consistent automation practices across different cloud environments without needing deep platform-specific expertise in each one.
“When everyone is going toward multicloud environments anyway, from an organizational perspective, they are getting away from a command-line world or even a web GUI and, in the case of AWS, increasingly relying on those [third-party] automation tools.”
Chris Gardner, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
AWS-Native Automation Tools
Organizations that prefer to stay within the AWS ecosystem have access to several native automation services:
- AWS OpsWorks: OpsWorks treats server configurations as code and uses Chef under the hood to automate configuration, deployment, and management of EC2 instances as well as on-premises servers. It is well suited for teams comfortable with the Chef model but wanting managed infrastructure from AWS.
- EC2 Systems Manager (now AWS Systems Manager): This service provides a broad set of automation capabilities, including patching, updating Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), running remote commands across fleets of instances, and building operational runbooks and workflows.
The choice between cloud-native and third-party automation tools often comes down to team expertise and whether the organization is committed to a single cloud provider or operating across multiple platforms. In multicloud scenarios, cloud-agnostic tools like Chef or Puppet typically offer more flexibility, while AWS-native tools provide tighter integration with the AWS service ecosystem.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Cloud Teams
- Demand for cloud automation skills is growing alongside DevOps and multicloud adoption.
- Organizations need both technical automation architects and cultural DevOps coaches to succeed.
- Cloud administrators with scripting experience can expand into automation roles with targeted upskilling.
- Tools like Chef and Puppet work across cloud platforms, making them valuable in multicloud environments.
- AWS-native services such as OpsWorks and Systems Manager offer robust automation for AWS-centric shops.
- Automation at scale translates directly to productivity gains and cost savings across development and operations.