Apple’s recent arrival to Seattle as the media and others talking about Seattle as a Cloud Capital.

The Seattle region has emerged as a major cloud computing hub thanks to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and a wide range of startups focused on cloud infrastructure and services. Much of Google’s cloud infrastructure work happens out of its Seattle-area offices.

In the short run, the new Apple office could intensify the competition for top engineers, but long-term it promises to add to the region’s status as a cloud center.

Influx of tech giants

Apple is the latest in a long list of tech giants from Silicon Valley and elsewhere who have established engineering outposts in the Seattle region. That list includes Google, Facebook, Oracle, HP, and many others, most recently Alibaba.

Talking to a friend who has the challenge to hire Cloud infrastructure engineers who isn’t in the above list he made the following observation. The typical pattern is engineers start at Microsoft, then move to Amazon, then Google. His challenge is to catch the engineers while they are making the transition and hire them to his company.

Take a 22 year old software engineer. Have them spend 3 years at Microsoft, 3 years at Amazon, and if they were able to make it to 3 years at Google. They’ll be 31 years old with 9 years experience building Clouds at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. That is killer resume, and he/she can go anywhere in the world now.

Name another area you could do that and not move.

Oh and there are handful of people who will be able to put Apple on their resume. Now that would kill. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple.