1. Learn how AWS or GCE works, not just with the command line tool but the APIs too. Fundamentally understand how all the offered technologies can be used toget

1. Learn how AWS or GCE works, not just with the command line tool but the APIs too. Fundamentally understand how all the offered technologies can be used together to host a platform for a business. While we still have bare metal and managed hosting, the world is moving to the cloud and your first priority should be to move with it. 2. Extend your skills into managing distributed software such as zookeeper, cassandra, etcd. In a cloud based world, machines can disappear at any time, hell entire Availability Zones can vanish because of an issue with the hosting provider. Fault tolerance is of the utmost importance. Distributed software such as zookeeper and cassandra are normally run in multiple AZs to tolerate such failure. 3. Learn about Docker and container orchestration. Like it or not, containers are the new level of abstraction and you should understand how they work. Knowing how to run a container isn't enough though, you need to understand how to run hundreds of them in an environment, which means some sort of system that handles orchestration. Look into Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. All of these are in fairly early stages of public use - Mesos has been battle tested at Twitter for 4-5 years though). I think these 3 things are really key for any person managing systems now and in the foreseeable future.