Cloud Engineer vs SW Eng Salary

I may get a chance to have some certifications and professional opportunities in cloud computing soon, and I was talking it and through on a developer slack I’m on.

Contrary to the salaries I’ve heard, the feedback I got was that it might downgrade my salary to go that direction, as my TC in a low COLA area is 145 and I was hearing it might be more like 120 for a cloud eng. Anecdata, all the friends I know in that line of work seemed to be coming in at 140-170. (Again this is all in the context of a low cost of living area - none of the salaries mentioned above are half bad, but not trying to go down).

Obviously this is really unscientific but just wanted to hear what people’s experiences were - I’m obviously not going to pursue the specialization if I’d be paid less as a result. #engineering #software