Add whatever cloud/container tech they're looking for into the skills part of your resume when applying. Take a day or two and do a crash course on Docker/Kubernetes. That will be enough to pass the interview. In fact, I think I've been asked 0 cloud/container questions during interviews. Tech companies don't really ask specific technical questions beyond Leetcode/System Design. Kind of odd but that's the way it is.
2) Many jobs use containers, but if you get out of the high-tech bubble, you'll find plenty of lower tech companies that haven't even started looking at containers. You'll be just fine with the right company.
i.e. stuff you can learn in a few hours of tutorials and then building some toy project to exercise the skill
Employers AND job seekers being overly focused some kind of perfect skills-to-role match. When the reality is, the best employees want to be challenged by new experiences. And employers say their best employees can grow outside of their comfort zone and evolve with their role.
The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One way is to explicitly share all the ways you've done this in the past. You emphasize how much you enjoy the process of diving in and learning about / mastering new technologies. You say it with joy.
This feels like circular reasoning. How do you "explicitly share all the ways you've done this" with just a resume or on a job application? Side projects? It would be helpful if you could give some concrete examples.
You give a thoughtful, enthusiastic response that emphasizes your love of learning, your humility, and highlights analogous experiences. No bullshitting needed at all.
Step 2: Put "Docker, AWS/GCP" in your resume in your "skills" section and in the section that belongs to your current job.
Profit.
If you know about containerization then it doesn't really matter if you have learn it in your side projects or your work. If you pass the interview that means the company is comfortable with your knowledge about containers.
Your CV is whatever you want it to be (with some limitations of course). If HR is expecting to see X in your CV, you can easily put it there if you do your homework. It doesn't really matter if you didn't use X in your last job, just put it there and demonstrate in the interview how well you know X.
Don't blame yourself. I know that explanation doesn't help your situation but it's nothing you did wrong. I wish as someone a little older who's been skulking around the industry for longer than I'd like to admit to myself that I had a better answer for you but this is legitimately a major problem in tech that has only gotten magnitudes worse over the recent years to the point I have completely given up on the corporate world. This is a serious problem our industry needs to collectively address. Our industry is going down the wrong path and dragging us along with it.
My first dev job was over 15 years in bare-metal hosting (RHEL) and this was one of my biggest weaknesses too. I didn't get penalized too badly for it in the end. I even got an interview with a company that specialized in some kind of Kubernetes based product. I didn't get an offer from them but I did get an offer soon after that from a 100% AWS-hosted product company. It probably helped that I had so many years of development experience and had learned the basics of docker and containerization tech generally, so I understood what it can do for you and I was able to talk about that stuff intelligently. I had run into all the usual pitfalls in bare metal devops over the years so I was looking forward to moving to docker/cloud based stuff.
Over a year later I'm still a bit more rusty than most of my coworkers on AWS stuff. But you can pick it up. If you teach yourself how to use containerization (e.g. docker) and get a feel for what the advantages are, what problems it solves, to the point where you can talk convincingly about how you're exited to get a chance to use it, I think you'll come across ok.
I think long term the java spring stuff will shoe horn you more than CF stuff but there’s plenty of work there.
It's pretty easy to tell theoretical experience from actual experience.
In my company, the infra team takes care of this. And not everything is on AWS, Azure or GCP. Most things are probably not actually.
> I basically never got a chance to do this at my job since everything is hosted on-premises using VMware's Cloud Foundry
Yes, still very common I would guess.
For public clouds I don't know, but learning a bit about containers is worth it, at least for debugging things you have developed running on production in a container.
I’d guess most big firms have some group working with public cloud; you just need to find them.
Disclaimer: Former AWS consultant, MAANG SRE/PE, once HPC/private cloud sysadmin and self-taught coder with EE/CS.
Stick those on your profile/CV and relate it the work you currently do - e.g. how would you migrate from on premise to the cloud etc...
