There are plenty of PHP developers that focus on PHP careers, C# developers that focus on C# careers. Windows developers that don't develop for Linux, and vice-

There are plenty of PHP developers that focus on PHP careers, C# developers that focus on C# careers. Windows developers that don't develop for Linux, and vice-versa. The cloud providers are just one abstraction above of OS's. AWS is Linux. Azure is Windows. GCP is Mac. No, not really. Just as an analogy of approximate customer market share, and again illustrating that there are plenty of people who could build careers on specializing in only one. Most developers, even. Then there's something like Kubernetes. Which, extending the analogy above, makes me think of HTML5/JavaScript development with Electron - write your logic once, run on any OS (or Cloud Provider). Now Electron is great, and web development is clearly very popular. But would you recommend that from an engineer's point of view, focusing on Web Development and Electron is the only way to build skills that are "highly transferable, fundamental skills"? Now if by transferable skills, you meant actually the underlying OS/networking/infrastructure/data center skills, well then that's A) not really cloud skills, and B) soon will be as niche as C/Assembly programmers - still vital, essential, and widespread - but also a tiny minority.