Every cloud leader talks about velocity. But fewer will admit that delivery speed isn’t determined by your best engineers… but by the gap between the best and the rest of the team.
Let’s call it what it is: a skills gap. Cloud leaders feel it in their gut because it’s not just about process; it’s about looking at two engineers and knowing one will nail in minutes while the other may need hours or days– double-checking syntax, second-guessing every change.
Obviously, this dynamic isn’t unique to DevOps. Product, Service, and R&D teams all get told, “just contribute to the repo.” They want to help, but without the skills, they either stall out…or worse, they ship something risky.
Said another way, the Skills Gap turns DevOps into a gatekeeper and slows everything.
What to do?
The Old Way of Closing the IaC Skills Gap
The traditional approach is slow and manual: code reviews for every change; training sessions that don’t stick; custom scripts to find issues weeks or months after they’re live.
While you’re doing all that, two things happen:
- 1) non-compliant resources slip through; and
- 2) left-behind resources pile up.
The result is a delivery model that gets slower as it scales (think: more reviews, more cleanup, more firefighting) while the work that actually moves the business forward slows to a crawl.
My view is, we need a new model for closing the gap.
The New Goal: Optimize for Throughput, Not Bandwidth
Think of infra delivery as a pipe: you can have a huge pool of work waiting, but the water only flows as fast as the narrowest point. That bottleneck is your team’s Skills Gap.
When one person’s delay holds up delivery, it triggers cascading delays: R&D waits for environments, product managers wait for features, customers wait for releases. The business bleeds time. And it’s on you to solve delays it in all their forms:
- Bottlenecks: The same handful of experts own every high-stakes change.
- Oversight: Less-experienced engineers need more hands-on management, slowing everyone.
- Risk: Without guardrails, “click-ops” changes drift from compliance and cost standards.
- Cascades: One delay ripples across teams, killing momentum.
I’m a big believer that there’s no compression algorithm for experience. The engineer with five years in IaC will always have better instincts than one who started last month.
But you can close the IaC Skill gap.
5 Ways to Close the IaC Skills Gap Today
Hint: it isn’t about more meetings or training slides. It’s about engineering your delivery model so skill level stops being the limiting factor. That means:
1 – Govern at the point of change
Catch and block risky changes before they ever hit production. Policy engines, blast-radius estimation, and automated reviews remove the need to hover over every commit.
2 – Keep all resources under control
Enforce module usage so updates flow to every governed resource. No more “left-behind” buckets or drift that slowly erodes your security, compliance, and cost posture.
3 – Encode expertise into the work itself
Turn your senior engineers’ instincts into guardrails that live inside your pipeline. When best practices are built into the delivery path, “less-experienced” still means “safe and compliant.”
4 – Make speed the default
The right automation turns the slowest engineer into a fast one—not by skipping steps, but by removing all the steps that don’t matter. When the pipe gets wider, everyone moves faster.
Last: Use AI as a force-multiplier, not a crutch
GenAI can bridge the gap from “not sure where to start” to “deployable” in minutes, and can embed your organization’s exact standards into every suggestion. But it works best when it’s reinforcing strong governance and automation—not replacing them.
The skills gap will always exist. The question is whether you let it set your throughput, narrow your pipeline and expand engineering toil, or build a delivery model that makes it irrelevant. We’ve been working on our answer to that–and, hopefully, an answer that’ll work for every team–and we’ll have more to share soon.
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