As cloud computing continues to gain traction among small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises alike, hiring demand for cloud skills continues to grow significantly.

More than 12,000 cloud computing jobs were advertised online during April, according to Wanted Analytics – a huge jump compared to previous months. In fact, cloud skills-based hiring increased almost 50 percent year-over-year when compared to April 2011 – and more than 275 percent versus April 2010.

Measure these stats with more recent numbers, which underscore that cloud skills are a hot commodity for cloud computing related job candidates. As of May 23, online job search engine Indeed had 24,171 jobs listing cloud skills as a requirement. Among those jobs, more than 3,000 pay over $120,000 per year – most of which are located in the San Francisco area.

Some of the most commonly advertised cloud computing related job titles, according to Wanted Analytics, include: software engineers, java developer, systems engineer, network engineer and Websphere cloud computing engineer. Other occupations with high demand for cloud computing skills were marketing managers, sales representatives, management analysts, operations managers and market research analysts.

In terms of specific requirements, potential candidates for cloud computing jobs are often required to have knowledge or experience with several tools and technologies, including: cloud computing; Oracle Java; Linux; Structured query language (SQL); UNIX; Software as a Service (SaaS); VMware Software; Salesforce CRM; Python extensible programming language; and Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (Perl).

San Jose continues to have a demand for the most cloud computing jobs in the country. The metro areas with the highest volume of cloud computing job ads during April, following San Jose, were: Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle and New York. Not only was the most demand seen in San Jose, but employers here also increased demand the most of these five metro areas. In April, over 1,700 job ads were posted online, 94 percent more than in April of 2011.

Across the U.S., companies are likely to find cloud computing jobs hard-to-recruit, with varying degrees of difficulty in each location depending on the available talent supply, Wanted Analytics said.

Employers in Seattle are currently experiencing some of the heaviest competition to attract talent and may experience a longer time-to-fill than many other areas across the United States, according to the Hiring Scale. In fact, the average posting period in Seattle is more than seven weeks.

Currently, the best places to recruit cloud-computing professionals are: Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Harrisburg, Penn., and Sarasota, Fla. These areas are likely to fill job openings faster than the rest of the U.S. Online job ads in these areas are posted for an average of about five weeks, more than two weeks shorter than in Seattle.