holmser

I would argue that you should learn AWS over OpenStack. It is the industry leader by a huge margin. It pains me to say that as I'm a huge fan of Ubuntu, Rackspace, and open source in general.

Not to steal OP's thunder, but In my experience it is seen as ambition, and ambitious. Also, "doing what is best for my family" is the easy way to say "I want more money."

There is a ton of push back against the cloud right now, mostly from established companies that have already invested in the datacenter. Right now it feels like enterprise is waiting for some early adopters to wade in and establish some best practices. As network speeds increase and private datacenter hardware ages I think there is going to be a massive cloud migration. No matter what, in IT you are putting your trust in someone whether it is your router, switch, server, SAN, fiber, datacenter, etc. Might as well be someone that can provide eleven 9's of reliability like AWS.

The real power of AWS is that it allows a small companies to use enterprise grade architecture without any of the initial capital investment and only paying for what you use. It allows startups to use the same infrastructure as established companies like Netflix and Amazon. This video is a really good overview of the system even if it is a bit long.

General rule of thumb: Network guys make a little more than systems guys, and security guys generally make a little more than networks guys. Six figures is expected for a senior engineer position where I live (not a large city)