Being a Cloud Architect

• Cloud Architects
• Cloud services and Hybrid Designs
• To be one, you must…
  • Be open-minded and strategic
  • Be an effective communicator
  • Understand that your solution can go against common patterns
  • Fully understand the nuances of any business requirement**
  • Be a good planner
  • Be up-to-date
• If it all sounds too overwhelming…

Cloud Architects

A Cloud Architect is responsible for translating business requirements into a technical architecture and design that can be used as a guide for building a final solution. They are responsible for working through complex business problems and bridging gaps between disparate teams.

• Work with members of a technology teams
• Work on high-level requirements from business teams or even from the chief executive officer.
• Come up with a solution design that uses the best suited services in a way that creates the best business outcome.

Cloud services and Hybrid Designs

Knowing the working details of cloud services and the advantages and the disadvantages of each of those services will help you in selecting and combining services that get the best outcome for your stakeholders.

• You could be developing cloud adoption plans, migration plans, application design, or deployment mechanisms, depending on what the business needs.

• You might also be working with ensuring connections between on-premise applications or data centers so you need to have good grounding in a wide range of IT services.

To be one, you must…

Be open-minded and strategic

• Be able to weigh up the benefits and consideration of a wide range of services, and then
• make decisions based on the criteria that you’ve been given over what may be popular or preferred right now

Be an effective communicator

• Be an effective communicator rather than just a good communicator
• Effective at describing the merits and therefore winning support for your solution with multiple stakeholders
• You need to be confident and well-researched with your solution design
• Be able to talk about benefits, risk, and clearly describe complex concepts to people that may have no technical knowledge
• Be able to lead and influence stakeholders within the organization

Understand that your solution can go against common patterns

• Doing things in a way differently from how things have been done in the past
• You may need to deal with groups or individuals with very strong opinions on technology
• You should be able to discuss and adjust to help stakeholders see why you’re proposed services creates the best solution

Fully understand the nuances of any business requirement

• The development process will have a lot of moving parts
• You have to understand the functionality that’s needed,
• You need to be thinking about the maintenance requirements for ongoing services.
• Evaluate and discuss the details of any particular service and why a specific service provides the best match to those requirements

Be a good planner

• Guide the development of the solution from beginning to end
• Be able to account and work through any roadblocks or complexities.
• Keep a view of the overall objective and the timeline
• Be very adaptive and be able to think on your feet

Be up-to-date

• Understand the latest and greatest services and why that may be the best or not the best solution for this particular design.

• Automate infrastructure and build pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment using the correct tools

If it all sounds too overwhelming…

Remember that no one is born a cloud architect. It can all be learnt.