3 hottest cloud job skills for 2016

Need a new gig or bigger paychecks? Burnish your skills and start your search here

I get this a lot: People approach me at conferences and ask about the hottest cloud skills. Why? Because they want to learn more, declare their expertise, and get a new and higher-paying gig. I can’t blame them.

In the past, it was enough to understand the differences among SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, but now companies are looking for very specific cloud skills. As their needs grow more specialized, qualified candidates are harder to find, so salaries go up and large signing bonuses are common.

What will be hot in 2016? Here are the three hottest cloud job skills I see: 

Node.js discloses two critical security vulnerabilities

The Node.js Foundation revealed a denial-of-service and an out-of-bounds access issue and said the fixes will come next week

Node.js is facing two security vulnerabilities, including a potentially major denial-of-service issue, with patches for the problems not available for a week. Releases of Node.js ranging from 0.12 to version 5 are vulnerable to one or both issues.

A bulletin issued today by the Node.js Foundation, which has jurisdiction over the popular server-side JavaScript platform, covers "a high-impact denial-of-service vulnerability" and a "low-impact V8 out-of-bounds access vulnerability." V8 is the Google-developed JavaScript engine leveraged by Node.js. Officially, the DoS issue is labeled as CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) 2015-8027, while the access problem is identified as CVE-2015-6764.