Fastest growing tech skills worth $110,000

Being a tech professional isn’t easy. In the tech industry, one day a skill is hot, the next it's not. So, keeping up with the current trends, skills and tools become very important.

Job hunting site Dice claims to help IT pros navigate which skills to pursue. It recently concluded an analysis of its database of 80,000+ tech jobs from April 2015 through April 2016 to determine the fastest-growing skills.

A cross-checking of those skills against Dice's annual salary survey, published in February, which offered the average salary for jobs using those particular skills in 2015, confirmed that all of them are indeed part of jobs that command average salaries of over $110,000.

Here is the list of 8 fastest growing tech skills worth over $110,000:

• Spark, up 120 percent, worth $113,214

Spark is a big data technology associated with Hadoop, a newer way to sift through the data to find answers. Its claim to fame is that it crunches through the data super-fast, faster than the traditional method, known as MapReduce.

In 2015, IBM announced that it was investing $300 million to help develop this free and open source technology, calling it "the most significant open source project of the next decade." Spark's creator, Matei Zaharia, has co-founded a hot startup called Databricks, which provides a commercial version of Spark.

• Azure, up 95 percent, worth $110,707

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing service. Most big companies use Microsoft's software and Microsoft has made it really easy for these customers to use its cloud for everything from securing their mobile devices to hosting their apps.

Consequently, IT professionals who know how to use Azure are increasingly in demand.

• Salesforce, up 48 percent, worth $107,810

Salesforce is a cloud software company best known for its "customer relationship management" (CRM) software. CRM software lets a company keep track of customers, prospects, and all sorts of interactions.

But Salesforce has now become a giant ecosystem of other add-on software products that work with CRM, each of which requires special skills in working with and managing Salesforce systems.

• Big data, up 43 percent, worth $121,328

Big data is the buzzword for a long list of technologies that allow companies to affordably store massive amounts of data from all sorts of sources. Companies can then sift through it all to find insights.

Companies are looking for expertise in setting up these systems, managing them, running them, analyzing the data, and choosing which tech to deploy for which big data project.

• JIRA, up 37 percent, worth $111,103

Atlassian's JIRA began life as a bug tracking tool for programmers and has since grown into project-management software for IT people and others used by over 35,000 companies.

• Cloud computing, up 33 percent, worth $112,972

Enterprises are increasingly using shared, rented computer servers, software, and storage accessed over the internet from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

That's a concept called cloud computing named because once upon a time, diagram drawing tools used a picture of a "cloud" as the icon to represent the 'internet.'

• Hive, up 32 percent, worth $129,400

Hive is another skill in high demand as part of the big data phenomena, particularly a big data tech called Hadoop.

Hadoop is software to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Hive provides a way to extract information from Hadoop using the same kind of traditional methods used by regular databases.

• Cassandra, up 32 percent, worth $147,811

Cassandra is a special kind of database called a no SQL database, which is part of the big data trend. NoSQL databases can handle massive amounts of data, spread across cheaper, low-end servers.

Cassandra was born at Facebook, but Facebook released it as a free and open source project and today it is used at companies including Apple, Comcast, Instagram, Spotify, eBay, Rackspace, and Netflix.