(digital music) >> Welcome back to "theCUBE's" live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. Lisa Martin here in Las Vegas with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've been here.. This is our third day, we started Monday night. We've done well over 70 interviews so far. I've lost count. >> Yeah, I don't count anymore. (Lisa laughing) >> Just go with the flow. >> We've been talking all things Cloud with AWS it's ecosystem of partners and customers. We're excited to welcome a couple of folks from Pluralsight to the program. Talking about the state of Cloud. Faye Ellis joins us, Principle Training Architect at A Cloud Guru, Pluralsight. Mattias Andersson is also here, Principle Developer Advocate at Pluralsight. Guys welcome to the queue. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Great to have you. >> Mattias: Glad to be here. >> Just in case our audience isn't familiar with A Cloud Guru and Pluralsight, why don't you give us just that high level elevator pitch? >> Yeah, well we basically help organizations transform their people so that they can deliver Cloud transformations within their own organizations. So it's all about upskilling and getting people Cloud fluent and ready to rock Cloud in their own organizations. >> Love that, Cloud fluent. But what are you hearing from the developer community? Your a developer advocate. We've seen so much pivot towards the developers really influencing business decisions, business direction. What's the voice of the developer like these days? >> Well, I think that a lot of developers are recognizing that the Cloud does offer a lot of value for the things that they're wanting to get done. Developers generally want to do things, they want to build things, they want stuff that they can look at and say, "Hey I made that and it's really good and it solves problems." And so I'm hearing a lot of people talking about how they value things like serverless, to be able to build those sorts of systems without a whole lot of other people necessarily needing to support them. They can get so much built on their own even. And then as teams, they can accomplish a lot of, again, the same sorts of projects. They can build those forward much more efficiently as a smaller team than they could have in the past without that technology. So I'm hearing a lot about that. Especially because I'm working with Cloud so much is what I mean, right? >> So it's kind of putting the power back into their hands as developers. Instead of having to wait for the infrastructure people or the support people to create a server so that they can deploy applications, there's a lot more tools to allow them to actually do that for themselves, isn't there? >> Absolutely, absolutely. It opens up so many doors. >> So pre-Ukraine, we were writing about the skills shortage. I call it the slingshot economy. All right. Oh wow it's like this talent war. And then all of a sudden, Twitter layoffs and there's this talent on the street. Now it might not be a perfect match, but what are you seeing in terms of new talent coming on that you can train and coach. How are you seeing the match and the alignment with what the demand for talent? Now I know your philosophy is you should be producers of talent, not consumers of talent. I get that. >> Faye: Yeah. >> But to produce talent you've got to coach, train, assist people. So what are you seeing today? What's the state of that sort of market? >> That's a really good question. I mean our State of Cloud report, it says that 75% of tech leaders are building all their new products and features in the Cloud. But what was the other stat, Mattias? >> Only 8% of the actual individuals that are working with the technology say that they have extensive skills with the Cloud. So that's a huge gap between the people who are wanting to build that forward as the leadership of the organization and the people that they have available, whether it's internal to their organization or external. So they do have a lot of people who are working in technology already in their organizations in general. But they do need to invest in that. Those technologists are learning things all the time. But are they maybe not learning the right things? Are they not learning them effectively? Are they not moving the organization forward? >> Dave: So go ahead, please. >> Yeah, so we think it's all about like nurturing the talent that you have already in your own organization. And those are the people who really know your business. And you know, it takes time to kind of upskill and really, really develop those Cloud skills and develop that experience. But it's not always the right thing to take on new teams. Like bring in new people and then you've got to get them up to speed with your own business. And actually isn't it much more wonderful to be able to nurture the talent within your own organization and and create that long-term relationship with your own employees. >> So where do you start? Like to get to work for Amazon you got to prove that you're reasonably professional. I mean everybody, the whole company has to like spin up an EC2 instance and do something with it. Is that where you start? Is it sort of education and what's available? What's the Cloud? Or is it more advanced than that? You're looking for maybe people with a technical mind that you're.. or do you have.. obviously have different levels, but take us through sort of the anatomy of experience. >> When you say, "Where do you start?" Who are you meaning? Are you meaning an organization, an individual, a team? >> You guys, when you bring on.. begin to expose an individual to the Cloud, >> Mattias: Right. >> Their objective is to become proficient at something. >> Right. >> Right. And so is it something that you have 100, 101, 201, basically? >> Well, you know what, if you want to learn how to swim you got to jump in the water. That's what I always think. And we focus on practical skills, the ability to do something, to get something done. Get something configured within the Cloud. A lot of the time our customers are asking us for skills that kind of go beyond certification. And for a really long time we were.. A Cloud Guru has been famous for getting engineers certified. But that's just one piece of the puzzle, isn't it? Certification is wonderful, but it's that chicken and egg scenario that I think that you were alluding to which is that you need experience to get the experience. So how are you going to get that experience? And we've got loads of different ideas to help people to actually do that. On our platform we've got lots of practical exercises that you can do. Building out serverless websites, configuring a web application firewall, building a VPC. We've got troubleshooting labs, we've got challenge labs, that kind of thing. And we've also got some free resources, haven't we as well, Mattias. >> Yes. >> Things like our Cloud Portfolio Challenges, which are like little projects that you can complete all by yourself. Creating serverless websites, playing around with SageMaker. You get some requirements and you have to design and actually build that. But it's all about getting that hands-on practice and that's kind of what we focus on. And we start off with easy things, and then we kind of layer it up and layer it up. And we kind of build on the easy foundations until, before you know it, you're Cloud fluent. >> Yeah, I think that there is a lot of value.. You were mentioning to, just to circle back on certifications, that is a really valuable way for a lot of people to start to take a look at the certifications that AWS offers, for example, and say, "How can I use those to guide my learning?" Because I know that sometimes people look at certifications as like a replacement for some sort of an assessment or whatever. And it's not really that most of the time. Most of the time the key value is that it guides people to learn a scope of material that is really valuable to them. And in particular it uncovers blind spots for them. So to answer your question of "Where do you start as an individual?".. People often ask me, "Okay, so I know all these things, which certifications should I get?" And I say, the Cloud Practitioner is the place to start. And they're like, "Oh, but maybe that's too easy." And I say, maybe it is, but then it's going to be really quick for you. If it's not really quick for you, then it was really valuable. You learned those key things. And if it was really quick but you didn't spend a lot of time on it and now you're just that much further along on the next certification that sort of guides you to the next larger scope. So it's a really valuable system that I often guide people to. To say that you can jump into that, anyone actually can jump into the Cloud Practitioner and learn that. And we often recommend that across an entire organization, you could potentially have everyone that gets that Cloud Practitioner. Whether you're finance or sales or leadership executive, the individual teams in technology departments of course. But everyone can get that Cloud fluency and then they can communicate far more effectively with each other. So it's not just the technologists that are needing to do that. >> Absolutely. And I think also it's about leading by example. If you're in leadership and you are asking your engineers to upskill themselves so that you can deliver your transformation goals, well actually, it's leadership responsibility to lead by example as well. And I heard a wonderful story from a customer. Just yesterday, a female CFO in her seventies just got her Cloud Practitioner certification. >> Lisa: Right on. >> I mean, that's wonderful. As I said before, a career in Cloud is a commitment to learning. It's lifelong learning. So yeah, that's wonderful. And long may it continue. I'd love to be in my seventies still learning new things and still rocking it. Maybe not the CFO, maybe something different. But yeah, that would be wonderful. >> How do you define Cloud fluency? There's so many opportunities that you both talked about and you walked through really kind of the step-by-step process. But how would someone define themselves as Cloud fluent? And how.. it's almost like what you were talking about, Mattias, is sort of the democratization of Cloud fluency across an organization, but what does it actually look like? >> Wow, good question. For me, I think it means everybody speaking the same language and having a common understanding. And I think that does kind of hark back to what you were saying before, Mattias, about the foundational certifications. The Cloud Practitioner type certification. What do you think? >> Yeah, I think a part of it is a mindset shift that people need to understand a different way of thinking about technology. That Cloud isn't just another tool just like all the others. It's a different way, a higher level of abstraction in technology that makes us more effective and efficient because of that. But because of that, also, we need to think about it in not the same way as we were before. So if you take it to the language analogy, instead of memorizing a few phrases like "Where is the bathroom?" or "How much does that cost?" or whatever, you have an understanding of the flow of the language. You understand that okay, there are verbs and nouns and I can put them together in this way. Oh, adjectives, those are kind of interesting. I can add those to things. And you have this model, mental model for how you can interact with the technology just like you would interact with the language or whatever other things. So the mental model actually, I think, is really the key thing that I keep coming back to a lot when people are learning that the mental model that you have for something is really what.. this sort of helps you understand the mastery of that. It's whether your mental model is mature and it's not changing a lot as you're learning new information, that's a really valuable milestone for someone to get to. Because as you're learning new things.. otherwise you would make assumptions, and then you learn new things that challenge those assumptions and you have to change the mental model to move forward. So the fluency is when that mental model, you have the understanding and you can then communicate. >> Yep. Love that. Last question for you guys is, we have about a minute left. If you had a billboard that you could put anywhere about A Cloud Guru at Pluralsight and what you're enabling with respect to Cloud fluency. I want you to each kind of take about 30 seconds to.. from your perspective, what would it say? >> Oh my goodness. I think it would say something like, Cloud is for everybody. It's no longer this elitist, difficult to understand, abstract thing. And I think it's something that is inclusive to everybody and that we should all be embracing it. And if you don't do it, you are going to be left behind because your competitors are going to be getting the advantages from Cloud. You're going to miss that competitive advantage and you're going to lose out. So yeah, that's probably quite a lot to put on a billboard. >> I love it. And Mattias, what would your billboard say? >> Ah, let me think. Okay. I might say something like, "The future of technology is accessible and important if you're in a technology career." I don't know, now it's getting more wordy. That's not quite right. But the point is that the Cloud really is the future of technology. It's not just some other little tool that's a fad or whatever. It's a different way of approaching technology. I'm realizing you're asking about the billboard as a short thing. The Cloud is the future. You can do it. You should do it. (everyone laughing) >> Drop the mic. Nailed it! Faye, Mattias, thank you so much joining us.. >> Thank you so much, we really appreciate it. >> Lisa: This was a great session. >> Thank you. >> Lisa: Great to have A Cloud Guru by Pluralsight on the program. We appreciate you stopping by. >> Oh, thank you so much. >> Thank you both so very much. >> We appreciate it. >> Lisa: Our pleasure. >> Thank you. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (digital music)