Original reporting sourced from virtualizationreview.com, citing Indeed.com’s Tech Skills Explorer report (data through September 2019).
Cloud and Containerization Skills Are in High Demand
Jobs platform Indeed.com analyzed internal job-posting data to identify the biggest macro-trends shaping the tech hiring market. The findings, published in the Indeed Tech Skills Explorer: Big Picture Tech Skill Trends report, covering activity from September 2014 through September 2019, pointed to three dominant themes: the rise of cloud computing and containerization, rapid JavaScript innovation, and surging demand for Big Data skills.
The headline finding for DevOps practitioners is straightforward: containerization and cloud skills are no longer niche capabilities — they have become standard requirements across a wide range of tech roles.
Docker and Kubernetes: The Fastest-Growing Containerization Skills
Indeed’s data identified Docker as the single fastest-rising tech skill over the five-year period ending September 2019, increasing more than 40x in job posting mentions between September 2014 and September 2019. The report’s explanation for this growth aligns with how practitioners use the technology:
“Docker, Kubernetes, and other containerized tech tools allow software engineers to isolate the environment in which an application runs, permitting rapid scalability as user traffic grows. Employers increasingly demand these skills.”
Indeed Tech Skills Explorer
Kubernetes, while newer to mainstream adoption than Docker, showed the steepest recent trajectory. In the single year ending September 2019, Kubernetes ranked ninth among all skills with the fastest growth — making it the most widely used tool on that particular fast-growth list.
AWS and Azure Become Standard Infrastructure Skills
Cloud platforms followed a similar trajectory. According to Indeed’s data:
- AWS became the sixth most commonly cited overall tech skill in job postings.
- Microsoft Azure ranked 17th overall.
Indeed summarized the shift clearly: cloud computing has moved from a cutting-edge, specialist skillset to a standard and widespread part of the workflow for many tech employees. For hiring managers, this means cloud fluency is increasingly a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
JavaScript: Angular, React, and Node.js Lead the Pack
The second major trend Indeed identified is continued rapid innovation in the JavaScript ecosystem. Key data points from the report:
- Angular held the top position as the most commonly required JavaScript library, having surpassed jQuery sometime in 2018.
- jQuery declined roughly 30% over five years, while Ajax dropped even further, down approximately 54%.
- React.js grew sharply over the five-year window and recently overtook jQuery as the second most popular JavaScript library in job postings.
- Node.js grew steadily throughout the period.
The takeaway for full-stack and front-end engineers is that the JavaScript landscape continues to evolve quickly. Skills tied to older patterns are losing ground, while component-based and server-side JavaScript skills remain in strong demand.
Big Data Tools and Data Science Programming Languages Surge
The third trend Indeed highlighted is the rise of data science and Big Data processing skills. Specific findings include:
- Apache Spark grew more than 10x since 2014 — described as “particularly stunning” growth.
- Amazon Redshift and TensorFlow (Google’s machine learning library) also showed steep upward trajectories.
- Python rose 123% over the five-year period and an additional 12% in just the final year.
- R more than doubled over five years, with a 6% gain in the final year alone.
As organizations generate and store more data, the programming languages and distributed processing frameworks purpose-built for data work are commanding a larger share of job descriptions — directly influencing what skills engineering teams are expected to hold.
What This Means for DevOps and Platform Engineering Teams
Taken together, the three trends Indeed identified reflect a broader shift in what production software infrastructure looks like. Containerized workloads running on managed cloud platforms, served by modern JavaScript front-ends, and backed by scalable data pipelines, have become the dominant architectural pattern. The skills required to build and operate these systems — Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Python, Spark — are now core competencies rather than specializations.
For individuals, this means that investment in container orchestration, cloud-native tooling, and data engineering fundamentals is likely to offer the strongest return in the job market. For engineering managers, the data reinforces the importance of structured upskilling programs that cover these foundational technologies before they become critical hiring gaps.
Report Methodology
Indeed’s analysis queried job descriptions posted on Indeed.com between September 2014 and September 2019 using a list of more than 500 tech skill terms. Only US English-language postings matching a defined set of tech job titles were included. The report notes one methodological caveat worth keeping in mind:
“Multiple skills can appear in the same job description and some terms can appear in multiple distinct skills, like ‘SQL’ and ‘SQL Server.'”
Indeed Tech Skills Explorer methodology note
The Tech Skills Explorer report this post draws on was the third of four parts in Indeed’s broader interactive series examining which tech skills are in demand and which job roles are using them.
Conclusion
Indeed’s job-market data through late 2019 painted a clear picture: cloud computing, containerization, modern JavaScript, and data science tooling had all reached an inflection point where employer demand far outpaced available talent. The underlying forces driving these trends — distributed systems, scalability requirements, and the explosion of data — have only intensified since this data was collected, making these skills as relevant today as they were at the time of the original report.