The Cloud Top Ten: The Most-Searched Cloud Topics at ACG

We reviewed our top searches on our platform over the past seven months, beginning in August at our One Platform launch. This analysis consists of more than 100,000 searches to determine what topics are most important for our learners.

Throughout the past seven months, several topics have remained remarkably consistent in their interest. Specifically, Kubernetes and Terraform have consistently been among the top-searched terms on ACG. But that’s not entirely surprising. Containers and infrastructure management are some of the most important—and fundamental—tenets of cloud computing.

But there are also several of what we’ll call horse races to steal the terminology from political polling (or sports betting, if you prefer). We’ve seen searches for AWS and Python trade places multiple times, up until February where Python was our most-searched term. Much of the machine learning ecosystem is built on top of Python, while AWS is still the top cloud infrastructure. 

As we enter the bottom half of the Cloud 10, we see a considerable amount of volatility. We’ve seen Azure in recent months claim higher search rankings up to consistently hovering at the halfway point. Simultaneously, there are often wholesale trading places for Ansible, Linux, Docker, and some other specific tools.

Notably, what we don’t see, is Google Cloud consistently placing among the top search terms. While Google Cloud is growing as another option for companies—especially as they shift to a multi-cloud approach to their infrastructure—it still has some room to grow compared to AWS and Azure.

Without further ado, here is the Cloud Ten counting up to our top search, as of the end of February:

10. Linux

Self-explanatory! We hope.

9. DevOps

Don’t know exactly what you’re looking for? Why not look for everything, then?

8. Jenkins

A newcomer appears! Jenkins is brand new in the rankings as of February, giving developers ways to automate parts of software development, like building, testing, and deploying. Automation is great.

7. Docker

We’re actually kind of surprised that Docker is in the bottom half of our cloud top ten, though it’s such a mainstay that perhaps there is so much stuff out there that more time is spent on topics outside of Docker. We’ll go with the glass-half-full interpretation.

6. Ansible

Automate IT. (Consistent!) configuration management. Automated deployment. Imagine doing all of the above automatic and avoiding poor configurations altogether.

5. Azure

We’ve seen Azure gain a tremendous amount of momentum in the past year or so. And we expect it to gain even more traction as time goes on—with more companies choosing to get started in the cloud with Azure or shifting to a multi-cloud strategy.

4. AWS

This is self-explanatory. We hope!

3. Terraform

Imagine, for a moment, trying to manage all the stuff in a VPC. Now two of them. Now two thousand. Not fun, right? Well, as applications inevitably scale to hundreds of millions of users, you’re really going to have to automate most of this. Praise Terraform.

2. Kubernetes

What’s life without containers? Not life at all. Or, not an accessible life. Good luck getting anything to work without a conductor behind your ecommerce apps as hundreds of millions of people rush to buy a Playstation 5.

1. Python

One of the go-to languages for all things machine training. We expect to see this consistently perform at the top as machine training gets an exclusive home on cloud technology. In particular, cloud providers are optimizing hardware for training—such as Google’s TPU.

This isn’t necessarily a comprehensive view of the demand for skills and expertise in cloud computing. While to a certain extent representative of the ecosystem, our searches are also snapshots of interest in moments in time. If there were any excellent example of that, it would be that Jenkins—an automation tool less than a decade old—placed among the top ten for the first time last month.

So, when considering where to devote your time when building expertise in cloud technology, always consider multiple data points. However, we do hope that our data point will also at least aid in your decision of where to focus your efforts. (And it’s also totally fine if you want to spend that time resting and/or building a farm in Stardew Valley, too!)