Cloud Native Contracts

Cloud Native
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Cloud Native in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Cloud Native over the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 200 320 270
Rank change year-on-year +120 -50 -48
Contract jobs citing Cloud Native 396 298 586
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 1.35% 0.68% 0.98%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 3.99% 2.25% 2.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 278 193 391
10th Percentile £401 £413 £475
25th Percentile £450 £500 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £555 £575 £650
Median % change year-on-year -3.48% -11.54% -
75th Percentile £680 £675 £700
90th Percentile £825 £725 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £512 £525 £603
% change year-on-year -2.48% -12.86% +0.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 4
10th Percentile - - £72.75
25th Percentile £55.25 - £76.13
Median hourly rate £55.50 - £78.00
75th Percentile £55.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £78.00
% change year-on-year - - +22.61%

All Generic Skills
UK

Cloud Native falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 9,915 13,252 19,898
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.91% 30.40% 33.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,331 8,505 13,670
10th Percentile £300 £263 £308
25th Percentile £413 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.42% -2.18% -
75th Percentile £650 £660 £680
90th Percentile £775 £788 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £496 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -0.90% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 394 910 640
10th Percentile £16.46 £12.25 £9.80
25th Percentile £21.00 £15.17 £10.63
Median hourly rate £32.05 £30.00 £22.49
Median % change year-on-year +6.83% +33.42% -18.24%
75th Percentile £63.75 £60.66 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.99 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.93 £27.75 £22.00
% change year-on-year +11.46% +26.14% +9.64%

Cloud Native
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Cloud Native as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Cloud Native in the UK

Cloud Native
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Cloud Native.

Daily rate trend for Cloud Native in the UK

Cloud Native
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cloud Native over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cloud Native in the UK

Cloud Native
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Cloud Native.

Hourly rate trend for Cloud Native in the UK

Cloud Native
Top 16 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Cloud Native within the UK over the 6 months to 30 April 2025. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +77 273 £550 -5.38% 603
London +69 179 £575 -4.17% 347
Work from Home +93 159 £550 -8.33% 415
UK excluding London +50 118 £512 -2.48% 283
Scotland +16 34 £528 +8.21% 21
North of England +43 28 £550 +9.73% 116
South East +36 26 £575 +15.00% 45
North West +25 21 £500 -4.53% 85
East of England +35 10 £350 -39.13% 16
Midlands +20 9 £459 -29.38% 32
South West +24 8 £463 -22.92% 32
East Midlands - 6 £431 - 13
Yorkshire +17 5 £629 - 25
Wales - 5 £475 - 10
West Midlands +6 3 £512 -21.23% 19
North East -2 1 £550 +48.65% 6

Cloud Native
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 11 (2.78%) Apache
1 11 (2.78%) Apache Airflow
1 11 (2.78%) OpenStack
2 9 (2.27%) Apache Spark
3 8 (2.02%) BizTalk Server
4 7 (1.77%) Confluence
5 6 (1.52%) nginx
6 4 (1.01%) Cloud Foundry
7 1 (0.25%) CMS
7 1 (0.25%) GeoServer
7 1 (0.25%) Headless CMS
Applications
1 1 (0.25%) Notion
1 1 (0.25%) Trello
Business Applications
1 3 (0.76%) SAP S/4HANA
1 3 (0.76%) Shopify
2 2 (0.51%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
3 1 (0.25%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 196 (49.49%) AWS
2 174 (43.94%) Azure
3 102 (25.76%) GCP
4 89 (22.47%) Serverless
5 50 (12.63%) SaaS
6 49 (12.37%) AWS CloudFormation
7 46 (11.62%) PaaS
8 44 (11.11%) GitHub
9 42 (10.61%) AWS Lambda
10 40 (10.10%) Azure DevOps
11 38 (9.60%) IaaS
12 31 (7.83%) Amazon S3
13 28 (7.07%) Azure AKS
14 21 (5.30%) Azure Monitor
15 20 (5.05%) GitHub Actions
16 18 (4.55%) Amazon EC2
16 18 (4.55%) Azure Sentinel
16 18 (4.55%) Cloud Computing
17 16 (4.04%) OpenShift
18 15 (3.79%) Microsoft 365
Communications & Networking
1 55 (13.89%) Firewall
2 29 (7.32%) DNS
3 27 (6.82%) TCP/IP
4 25 (6.31%) BGP
5 24 (6.06%) HTTP
6 20 (5.05%) 5G
6 20 (5.05%) OSPF
7 18 (4.55%) DHCP
7 18 (4.55%) HTTPS
8 15 (3.79%) 4G
8 15 (3.79%) Radio Access Network
9 14 (3.54%) VPN
10 13 (3.28%) 5G NR
10 13 (3.28%) LTE
11 8 (2.02%) MPLS
12 7 (1.77%) Network Security
12 7 (1.77%) VLAN
13 6 (1.52%) NX-OS
14 5 (1.26%) OpenLDAP
14 5 (1.26%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 45 (11.36%) NoSQL
2 18 (4.55%) Amazon RDS
3 17 (4.29%) MongoDB
4 13 (3.28%) BigQuery
4 13 (3.28%) Data Warehouse
5 11 (2.78%) Azure SQL Database
5 11 (2.78%) PostgreSQL
5 11 (2.78%) Power BI
6 9 (2.27%) DynamoDB
6 9 (2.27%) Relational Database
7 8 (2.02%) Amazon Redshift
7 8 (2.02%) Looker
8 7 (1.77%) Big Data
9 6 (1.52%) Data Lake
9 6 (1.52%) Elasticsearch
9 6 (1.52%) Metadata
9 6 (1.52%) Oracle Database
9 6 (1.52%) SAP HANA
9 6 (1.52%) Tableau
10 4 (1.01%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 56 (14.14%) Jenkins
2 35 (8.84%) GitLab
3 20 (5.05%) Git
4 14 (3.54%) JIRA
5 8 (2.02%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 8 (2.02%) MSI
6 7 (1.77%) Artifactory
6 7 (1.77%) CircleCI
6 7 (1.77%) Cypress.io
7 5 (1.26%) Robot Framework
7 5 (1.26%) Selenium
8 4 (1.01%) NUnit
8 4 (1.01%) Terragrunt
9 3 (0.76%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.76%) Cucumber
9 3 (0.76%) git-flow
9 3 (0.76%) Gradle
9 3 (0.76%) JMeter
9 3 (0.76%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (0.51%) SonarQube
General
1 130 (32.83%) Social Skills
2 74 (18.69%) Finance
3 34 (8.59%) Analytical Skills
4 27 (6.82%) Public Sector
4 27 (6.82%) Telecoms
5 23 (5.81%) Banking
6 13 (3.28%) Presentation Skills
6 13 (3.28%) Retail
7 6 (1.52%) Billing
8 5 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.26%) Legal
8 5 (1.26%) Marketing
9 4 (1.01%) Games
10 3 (0.76%) Aviation
10 3 (0.76%) Digital Health
10 3 (0.76%) Financial Institution
10 3 (0.76%) Front Office
10 3 (0.76%) Investment Banking
11 2 (0.51%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (0.51%) German Language
Job Titles
1 132 (33.33%) Architect
2 58 (14.65%) Senior
3 49 (12.37%) Cloud Architect
4 43 (10.86%) Developer
5 40 (10.10%) Solutions Architect
6 36 (9.09%) DevOps Engineer
7 29 (7.32%) Technical Architect
8 26 (6.57%) Security Architect
9 22 (5.56%) Data Engineer
10 20 (5.05%) Lead
11 19 (4.80%) AWS Engineer
12 18 (4.55%) AWS Architect
12 18 (4.55%) Azure Architect
12 18 (4.55%) Cloud Native Architect
12 18 (4.55%) Platform Engineer
13 17 (4.29%) Cloud Engineer
14 16 (4.04%) Kubernetes Engineer
15 14 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
15 14 (3.54%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 13 (3.28%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (8.33%) Kafka
2 32 (8.08%) .NET
3 27 (6.82%) React
4 22 (5.56%) AWS CDK
5 18 (4.55%) Spring Boot
6 17 (4.29%) OAuth
6 17 (4.29%) Spring
7 14 (3.54%) .NET Core
7 14 (3.54%) RESTful
8 13 (3.28%) OpenID
9 11 (2.78%) AngularJS
9 11 (2.78%) SAML
10 10 (2.53%) ARM Templates
10 10 (2.53%) GraphQL
11 9 (2.27%) JSON
11 9 (2.27%) Node.js
12 8 (2.02%) OpenTelemetry
12 8 (2.02%) PySpark
13 7 (1.77%) Elastic Stack
13 7 (1.77%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 24 (6.06%) Distributed Systems
2 17 (4.29%) Enterprise Software
3 15 (3.79%) Public Cloud
4 14 (3.54%) Data Centre
4 14 (3.54%) Product Ownership
5 12 (3.03%) Team-Oriented Environment
6 9 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
7 8 (2.02%) Algorithms
7 8 (2.02%) Hybrid Cloud
8 6 (1.52%) Mobile App
8 6 (1.52%) Security Posture
8 6 (1.52%) Self-Motivation
9 5 (1.26%) Onboarding
10 4 (1.01%) Data Protection Act
10 4 (1.01%) Distributed Computing
10 4 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
10 4 (1.01%) Legacy Applications
10 4 (1.01%) Private Cloud
10 4 (1.01%) TWAP
10 4 (1.01%) VWAP
Operating Systems
1 45 (11.36%) Linux
2 25 (6.31%) Windows
3 11 (2.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (2.53%) Unix
5 7 (1.77%) Windows Server
6 4 (1.01%) SUSE
7 2 (0.51%) Android
7 2 (0.51%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.25%) Amazon Linux
8 1 (0.25%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 179 (45.20%) DevOps
2 167 (42.17%) CI/CD
3 149 (37.63%) Infrastructure as Code
4 122 (30.81%) Agile
5 107 (27.02%) Problem-Solving
6 93 (23.48%) Microservices
7 75 (18.94%) Containerisation
8 58 (14.65%) Migration
9 53 (13.38%) Test Automation
10 48 (12.12%) Continuous Improvement
11 47 (11.87%) Analytics
11 47 (11.87%) High Availability
12 41 (10.35%) Computer Science
13 39 (9.85%) Cloud Security
14 36 (9.09%) Event-Driven
14 36 (9.09%) Observability
15 35 (8.84%) Mentoring
15 35 (8.84%) Roadmaps
16 32 (8.08%) Scrum
16 32 (8.08%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 161 (40.66%) Python
2 64 (16.16%) Java
3 57 (14.39%) SQL
4 41 (10.35%) Bicep
5 37 (9.34%) Bash
6 36 (9.09%) JavaScript
7 35 (8.84%) PowerShell
8 26 (6.57%) TypeScript
9 21 (5.30%) C#
10 19 (4.80%) Go
11 9 (2.27%) Scala
12 8 (2.02%) C++
12 8 (2.02%) Shell Script
13 7 (1.77%) Groovy
13 7 (1.77%) PL/SQL
14 6 (1.52%) T-SQL
15 4 (1.01%) Kusto Query Language
15 4 (1.01%) PHP
16 3 (0.76%) Kotlin
16 3 (0.76%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 44 (11.11%) Degree
2 43 (10.86%) AWS Certification
3 38 (9.60%) Security Cleared
4 33 (8.33%) SC Cleared
5 27 (6.82%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 27 (6.82%) Computer Science Degree
6 25 (6.31%) Azure Certification
7 11 (2.78%) Master's Degree
8 8 (2.02%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
8 8 (2.02%) CISSP
8 8 (2.02%) TOGAF Certification
9 6 (1.52%) Cisco Certification
10 5 (1.26%) CISM
11 4 (1.01%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
11 4 (1.01%) CISA
11 4 (1.01%) CITP
11 4 (1.01%) PMI Certification
11 4 (1.01%) PMP
12 3 (0.76%) (ISC)2 CCSP
12 3 (0.76%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (4.04%) QA
2 12 (3.03%) GDPR
3 11 (2.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 9 (2.27%) Data Quality
4 9 (2.27%) PCI DSS
5 7 (1.77%) NIST
6 6 (1.52%) Accessibility
7 3 (0.76%) HIPAA
7 3 (0.76%) NIST 800
8 2 (0.51%) Disclosure Scotland
8 2 (0.51%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
8 2 (0.51%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.25%) COBIT
9 1 (0.25%) FedRAMP
9 1 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.25%) SLA
System Software
1 74 (18.69%) Docker
2 13 (3.28%) Active Directory
3 11 (2.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 8 (2.02%) Virtual Machines
4 8 (2.02%) VMware NSX
5 3 (0.76%) Apache ZooKeeper
5 3 (0.76%) Oracle RAC
6 2 (0.51%) Hyper-V
7 1 (0.25%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 162 (40.91%) Terraform
2 144 (36.36%) Kubernetes
3 89 (22.47%) Ansible
4 21 (5.30%) Grafana
4 21 (5.30%) Prometheus
5 20 (5.05%) Progress Chef
6 17 (4.29%) Puppet
7 11 (2.78%) Microsoft Intune
8 10 (2.53%) Argo
9 8 (2.02%) NSN NetAct
9 8 (2.02%) Rancher
10 6 (1.52%) FortiGate
10 6 (1.52%) Single Sign-On
11 5 (1.26%) Consul
11 5 (1.26%) Packer
12 4 (1.01%) Amdocs OSS
12 4 (1.01%) logstash
13 3 (0.76%) Istio
13 3 (0.76%) Oracle RMAN
14 2 (0.51%) CASB
Vendors
1 85 (21.46%) Microsoft
2 43 (10.86%) Google
3 27 (6.82%) Cisco
4 23 (5.81%) Palo Alto
5 22 (5.56%) SAP
6 21 (5.30%) Fortinet
7 20 (5.05%) Oracle
8 18 (4.55%) CheckPoint
8 18 (4.55%) Splunk
9 14 (3.54%) Ericsson
10 12 (3.03%) Nokia
10 12 (3.03%) VMware
11 11 (2.78%) Dynatrace
12 9 (2.27%) ServiceNow
13 8 (2.02%) Databricks
13 8 (2.02%) MuleSoft
13 8 (2.02%) Salesforce
14 7 (1.77%) Red Hat
15 6 (1.52%) AppDynamics
15 6 (1.52%) Broadcom