Kubernetes was the dominant technology skill requested by IT firms in 2018, according to a new report from jobs board Dice.

The report, which scoured the site’s job postings, found that “Kubernetes” was far and away the skill most requested by IT recruiters and hiring managers. Nate Swanner, editor of Dice Insights, noted that Kubernetes – and to a lesser extent Terraform – led the demand of skill requests toward “containerization of apps and services, as well as the cloud.” Terraform is an infrastructure as code software by HashiCorp.

“The popularity of these two skills suggests that companies are continuing to invest in designing their own scalable stacks that use cloud services such as [Amazon Web Services] or Azure for storage and compute,” Swanner wrote.

The Dice news followed similar findings released late last year from jobs board Indeed.

Indeed’s work found that Kubernetes had the fastest year-over-year surge in job searches among IT professionals. It also found that related job postings increased 230 percent between September 2017 and September 2018.

Microsoft led that surge with 1.59 percent of its job postings on Indeed including “Kubernetes” in the post. IBM was second with 1.38 percent of its job postings related to the topic, followed by JPMorgan Chase (1.14 percent), Oracle (1.12 percent), and VMware (1.01 percent).

These numbers indicate that not only are companies interested in developers with experience but that they are also finding it difficult to fill those positions. The community has been active in trying to bridge this gap.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation last May launched its Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam and Kubernetes for Developers course. That followed up its previously launched Certified Kubernetes Administrator program. CNCF also offers developer training programs that link into those exam programs.

Shannon Williams, co-founder and vice president of sales at Rancher Labs, told SDxCentral that these programs were great starting points.

“The certification hits on all the important elements of deploying and maintaining Kubernetes clusters,” Williams said. “We’re thrilled when we find someone who has a base with the CNCF certification exams. The test is difficult and requires a real understanding of how to use Kubernetes and containers in production.”