I think the biggest problem with hiring an AWS or Azure consultant, is you might not get someone who actually does infrastructure as code (at least this happens a fair bit in London).

I'd rather hire someone who knows terraform and another cloud, than somebody who'll click on the GUI for my preferred cloud, and make excuses around not being able to follow process.

This is insane -- how do these people pass through an interview?

It depends on the person interviewing you.

It's common enough for them no to be technical at all, such as a scrum master or project manager, it's also common enough for the first person on site (those working for really low remuneration and a lottery ticket) to just not be that good.

This is crazy to me. Any reasonable certification to qualify someone for an AWS specific role will cover IaC in depth. I guess it explains a lot about the number of cloud antipatterns I see on a day to day basis though.

I've seen people with certs who are fairly crazy too, and heard comments like "$foo is good in theory, but it's not really possible in practice".

I'm afraid its a large part of the market here, but you're more exposed to the different parts of the market when you're contracting and thus moving around on a semi-regular basis.

In my experience there's much more transferability of skills laterally between cloud platforms than there is within the platform itself, ie. knowing how to design a high-volume transaction platform on Azure or AWS is going to be leveraging the same kind of technologies with the same kind of behaviors and features, the real change is going to be in details that in my opinion are quick to figure out.

But arguably if you are specialized in building internal tooling in AWS, the gap to design an effective HVT platform in AWS will be much harder to fill. Same thing goes if your specialization is more on the infra side of AWS or on the application development using paas.