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10 tech skills that will get you a $130,000-plus salary
It's a good time to be a tech professional.
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Finding high-paying jobs in the tech field isn't hard. But staying on top of the in-demand skills is a bit harder.
Job website Dice.com recently published its 2016 salary survey. The company surveyed 16,301 IT professionals in the fall of 2015 to come up with this list of average salaries for people with particular in-demand skills.
Of course skills alone don't always lead to a high salary. You need the experience too.
Puppet is IT automation software from Puppet Labs, one of a handful of young companies that's part of a huge, new tech trend called "DevOps."DevOps is when the developers creating software ("dev") and the teams responsible for deploying that software ("ops") use certain techniques so they can deploy technology almost as fast as it's released.
MapReduce is a programming framework used for analyzing data to get meaning out of it. It's most commonly associated with Hadoop, a system for storing data across a bunch of low-cost servers.
Pig is another hot skill associated with Hadoop. It's a programming language that lets you extract information from Hadoop find answers to questions or otherwise use the data.
Chef is IT automation software that's part of the DevOps trend we mentioned earlier. It competes with Puppet.
Cloud computing is a big trend, and there's a battle over the different "cloud operating systems."Several of them are free and open source, but they're mostly built by vendors who want to sell a commercial version along with cloud-computing software or equipment.
One example is CloudStack, run by the Apache Software Foundation (keeper of many open-source projects) and backed by Citrix, which sells a commercial version of it.
Another free and open-source cloud-computing operating system is OpenStack. Many vendors are supporting it and selling their own commercial versions of it, such as IBM, HP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and lots of others.
PaaS is "platform as a service," which is a cloud system that lets developers build entire applications and host them in the cloud. Microsoft's Azure is the most prominent example.
Cloudera makes a commercial version of Hadoop. Although Hadoop is a free and open-source project for storing large amounts of data on inexpensive computer servers, the free version of Hadoop is not easy to use. Several companies have created friendlier versions of Hadoop, and Cloudera is among the most popular.
Cassandra is a free and open source "noSQL" database, which can handle and store data of different types and sizes. It's increasingly the go-to database for mobile and cloud applications. Apple uses Cassandra in a big way to store over 10 petabytes of data. Netflix uses it, too, among many others.
HANA is SAP's database, the company's Oracle competitor. HANA is a part of a new wave of databases, known as an in-memory database. It runs entirely in a computer's memory instead of on storage disks. It can crunch large amounts of data nearly instantly.
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