Senior cloud talent and rates in Healthcare
Senior cloud engineers serving healthcare run roughly $125–$180/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Epic / Cerner FHIR R4 + SMART-on-FHIR; HIPAA-eligible AWS/Azure/GCP; Twilio HIPAA-eligible comms; Datadog HIPAA-mode — common integrations: Epic (MyChart / FHIR R4 / App Orchard), Cerner / Oracle Health, Allscripts. HIPAA-eligible AWS/Azure/GCP services only — Lambda eligible; some preview services not BAA-covered
What cloud actually requires in 2026
2026 cloud: AWS still dominates 30%+ market share, GCP excels for AI/ML + data, Azure for enterprise + Microsoft-shop. Modern shops use Terraform + AWS CDK or Pulumi for IaC, Kubernetes for orchestration, and combinations of managed services (RDS, ElastiCache, S3) with custom workloads. Real cloud architects hold AWS Solutions Architect Pro / GCP Professional Cloud Architect / Azure Solutions Architect Expert and have shipped >2 production migrations end-to-end. "AWS certified solutions architect associate" is entry-level — necessary but not sufficient for senior work.