Any Cloud architects here?

[fizzwheel]

aaron_2000 said:

My biggest question for any of you is how would you suggest breaking into a more specialised role without 5-10+ years of real, tangible experience to put on your CV?

The tried and tested path is what I did and what many others have done. It is to go and get that experience. I started out on a helpdesk and have worked my way through all the support tiers and now I'm in an Infra Architect role.

Having done my time in those roles actually helps me design and build better systems as I'm thinking about how the business will use what I am designing and also about how the service desk etc will support and run it all this in my opinion is just as important as the technology and you cant ( again IMHO ) really learn it from a book or by sitting exams. Although they do help understand the theory.

The company I work for is a mix i.e on Prem and Cloud, it depends on what the service is and what data is holds as to where it's hosted or run.

As the others have said IMHO the trick here isn't to focus on the technology but more on the business or customer requirements then pick the best solution based on those rather than just running everything on Prem or in the cloud.

[aaron_2000]

fizzwheel said:

The tried and tested path is what I did and what many others have done. It is to go and get that experience. I started out on a helpdesk and have worked my way through all the support tiers and now I'm in an Infra Architect role.

Having done my time in those roles actually helps me design and build better systems as I'm thinking about how the business will use what I am designing and also about how the service desk etc will support and run it all this in my opinion is just as important as the technology and you cant ( again IMHO ) really learn it from a book or by sitting exams. Although they do help understand the theory.

The company I work for is a mix i.e on Prem and Cloud, it depends on what the service is and what data is holds as to where it's hosted or run.

As the others have said IMHO the trick here isn't to focus on the technology but more on the business or customer requirements then pick the best solution based on those rather than just running everything on Prem or in the cloud.

The helpdesk is where I started too when I was 16 and almost put me off every working in IT again, then I moved to a role doing application deployment and working with stuff like SCCM. I left last year to focus on getting some certifications

[HappyMidget]

aaron_2000 said:

The helpdesk is where I started too when I was 16 and almost put me off every working in IT again, then I moved to a role doing application deployment and working with stuff like SCCM. I left last year to focus on getting some certifications

I would start looking into DevOps in that case. Takes a good few years of development using different technologies to even be able to start being an Architect and being able to pick the right technologies for the right application. I am now just starting to roll into the role of being an Azure Data Platform Architect whilst still performing my day 2 day as a Senior Consultant Data Engineer.

[fizzwheel]

aaron_2000 said:

The helpdesk is where I started too when I was 16 and almost put me off every working in IT again, then I moved to a role doing application deployment and working with stuff like SCCM. I left last year to focus on getting some certifications

OK that's all useful stuff, but you're main problem is trying to convince somebody to take a chance on you when you don't have any "architectural experience" and that's really difficult.

When I got into third line support I also started picking up engineering tasks related to delivering business projects, this is what really got my foot into the door of architecture as I found I cleared the engineering tasks out the way and I then started picking up smaller design pieces of work from the architects I was working with and I learnt from them and then that's how I built up my experience which lead me into the job I have now.

when you say you "Left last year" does that mean you're not working at the moment ? If so go and start applying for second / third line engineering roles and then see if you can get somebody to invest in you or any opportunities come your way like they did mine.

Qualifications / certifications are only going to get you so far, there is a difference ( in my opinion ) between learning on a training course and then actually trying to get the tech to work in a real world live environment.

Also with the "COVID" impact on the job market there are lots of people out there you'll be competing with for roles and they'll most likely have experience. Which at the moment you wont have, this is chicken in egg as you probably have identified already in that "how can I get experience if I cant get an architecture role" so you'll need to persuade somebody to give you a chance and I always think that's better / easier to do if your able to grab some opportunities like I did.

The other thing I would suggest you look at is "TOGAF" its mostly theory, but it will give you a better understanding of "architecture" as a practise / methodology, but remember is a "framework" to guide you / inform you rather than being a hard set of rules.

I've noticed recently that a lot of architecture roles are now advertising for TOGAF certification, so I think it might help you get your foot in the door or at least yourself in front of somebody in an interview scenario.

Hope that's useful and I am not trying to put you off, but I really think you need a real balance of training courses, certificates and experience and don't focus on the technology side to much think about what your business / stakeholders want and need, remembering that what they think they might want, might not actually be what they need !

[rxe]

Architects are architects - I can’t stand the whole “cloud architect” moniker. An architect is the intellectual owner of a component or project, doesn’t matter if it is in your own data centre or someone else’s. From a technical perspective cloud gives you a bunch of options that generally aren’t there on prem but also come with a bunch of constraints, particularly if you’re at the limit of what “normal” is. Sometimes it is cheaper, but occasionally it can be a lot more expensive. At the end of the day, the really gnarly questions like “how do I manage state”, “how do I scale”, “how do I recover from technical failure” and the one everyone ignores “how do I recover from functional failure” - all have to be answered.

The key skills an architect needs are adaptability and curiosity. Someone mentioned “infra architects” a few posts back, and I’ve met people like that, but let’s face it, I was one 15 years ago. If they’re still trying to fight the battles of 2005 today, then they are indeed a problem, but if they’re using that knowledge to challenge IOPS figures on cloud platforms (sometimes surprisingly low), then they are on the side of goodness.

How do you become an architect? Experience. There is no short cut. You don’t go to architect school and come out an architect who can make decisions on large programmes. You learn by being a developer or a DBA. You see what works and what doesn’t. You really learn by being an operator. Trying to unpick a load of overspecified junk at 2AM really teaches you fast how not to build systems. Help desk is actually not a bad starting point You either are sitting there thinking “how much longer do I have to do this”, or you’re thinking “80% of my calls are for stupid password resets, how can I make this easier”.

One option is to go for a narrow route - become an expert in something - SAP, EFK, Openshift whatever. Once you’re good at it, people will be after your knowledge - you’re moving into an architecture role. Then get onto - what are the alternatives, what is the roadmap, what other things are linked to this, and you’ll be on the right journey. But don’t get stuck unless you are really sure that platform has legs, you need variety, and to see alternative ways of doing things.

[aaron_2000]

rxe said:

Architects are architects - I can’t stand the whole “cloud architect” moniker. An architect is the intellectual owner of a component or project, doesn’t matter if it is in your own data centre or someone else’s. From a technical perspective cloud gives you a bunch of options that generally aren’t there on prem but also come with a bunch of constraints, particularly if you’re at the limit of what “normal” is. Sometimes it is cheaper, but occasionally it can be a lot more expensive. At the end of the day, the really gnarly questions like “how do I manage state”, “how do I scale”, “how do I recover from technical failure” and the one everyone ignores “how do I recover from functional failure” - all have to be answered.

The key skills an architect needs are adaptability and curiosity. Someone mentioned “infra architects” a few posts back, and I’ve met people like that, but let’s face it, I was one 15 years ago. If they’re still trying to fight the battles of 2005 today, then they are indeed a problem, but if they’re using that knowledge to challenge IOPS figures on cloud platforms (sometimes surprisingly low), then they are on the side of goodness.

How do you become an architect? Experience. There is no short cut. You don’t go to architect school and come out an architect who can make decisions on large programmes. You learn by being a developer or a DBA. You see what works and what doesn’t. You really learn by being an operator. Trying to unpick a load of overspecified junk at 2AM really teaches you fast how not to build systems. Help desk is actually not a bad starting point You either are sitting there thinking “how much longer do I have to do this”, or you’re thinking “80% of my calls are for stupid password resets, how can I make this easier”.

One option is to go for a narrow route - become an expert in something - SAP, EFK, Openshift whatever. Once you’re good at it, people will be after your knowledge - you’re moving into an architecture role. Then get onto - what are the alternatives, what is the roadmap, what other things are linked to this, and you’ll be on the right journey. But don’t get stuck unless you are really sure that platform has legs, you need variety, and to see alternative ways of doing things.

Architecture interests me but my understand of the roles has been severely lacking, I have a few years of run of the mill experience and now I'm ready to pursue more specialised roles. I have an idea of the kind of thing I'm interested in and the technology that I enjoy but I really started the thread because I needed a much broader view of what areas to potentially pursue and what I should be learning. A good 60% of my calls were related to poor PC performance so I created a cleanup toolkit which could be left to run by itself without the need for intervention, it wasn't much but I was chuffed to see something I implemented being used. I like the creation process, I chose AWS to learn because of it's market share and array of services which I assumed would give a larger amount of jobs to apply for and a broader range of roles.

fizzwheel said:

OK that's all useful stuff, but you're main problem is trying to convince somebody to take a chance on you when you don't have any "architectural experience" and that's really difficult.

When I got into third line support I also started picking up engineering tasks related to delivering business projects, this is what really got my foot into the door of architecture as I found I cleared the engineering tasks out the way and I then started picking up smaller design pieces of work from the architects I was working with and I learnt from them and then that's how I built up my experience which lead me into the job I have now.

when you say you "Left last year" does that mean you're not working at the moment ? If so go and start applying for second / third line engineering roles and then see if you can get somebody to invest in you or any opportunities come your way like they did mine.

Qualifications / certifications are only going to get you so far, there is a difference ( in my opinion ) between learning on a training course and then actually trying to get the tech to work in a real world live environment.

Also with the "COVID" impact on the job market there are lots of people out there you'll be competing with for roles and they'll most likely have experience. Which at the moment you wont have, this is chicken in egg as you probably have identified already in that "how can I get experience if I cant get an architecture role" so you'll need to persuade somebody to give you a chance and I always think that's better / easier to do if your able to grab some opportunities like I did.

The other thing I would suggest you look at is "TOGAF" its mostly theory, but it will give you a better understanding of "architecture" as a practise / methodology, but remember is a "framework" to guide you / inform you rather than being a hard set of rules.

I've noticed recently that a lot of architecture roles are now advertising for TOGAF certification, so I think it might help you get your foot in the door or at least yourself in front of somebody in an interview scenario.

Hope that's useful and I am not trying to put you off, but I really think you need a real balance of training courses, certificates and experience and don't focus on the technology side to much think about what your business / stakeholders want and need, remembering that what they think they might want, might not actually be what they need !

When I worked on the helpdesk, they didn't have split lines they just had it all integrated into one role, so you'd be handling passwords to telephony to major site outages from 1st to 3rd line. It was a good range of experience despite being mind numbing most of the time. My contract came to an end, it was going to be renewed for another 6 months but I decided to leave and focus on revising. I've seen the TOGAF but not looked much into it, I saw the 55% required to pass so I'm guessing it's quite intensive? None of it puts me off, I don't have my heart set on any role or any particular technologies other than knowing that I'd like to be doing something cloud related and ideally be exposed to some form of AWS services. One plus side of being young is being able to tailor myself to where the demand is/will be in what I learn, everyone's advice has been invaluable

[fizzwheel]

TOGAF - I found it intensive, there are two exams, the first one I found hardest as its a "closed book" exam so you really have to know the subject matter, the second one is easier as they give you a "business scenario" then ask you to make a recommendation based on 4 possible answers and that one is open book so you can look at the TOGAF reference materials when sitting it.

Once you understand the terminology and how to apply it, its reasonably straightforward, but if you're going into it cold with no "architecture" experience you may well find it harder.

Sounds to me like you don't really know what you want to do, that's fine I was the same when I was 21, also sounds to me like you like the "engineering" side i.e. building things, deploying systems etc, as an architect I don't really do that anymore. I look at the business requirements, and then write down the design which is then given to somebody else to go and deploy. Unless it's completely new tech then I have to write the design then do the actual deployment as well.

So be mindful if its hands on engineering you want, depending the setup of the company an architect might be hands on or they might not be. I've had colleagues join my team because they wanted to be an architect, but they also wanted to be hands on and build environments and servers and that's not necessarily a given that it will work out that way.

I think AWS and or Azure are the cloud technologies I would be wanting to look at if I were you, my advice again here is don't specialise in just one thing, if you want to be an Architect it will serve you better in the long run if you have a good understanding of a lot of technologies. But my guiding principle is that it's not the technology itself that is important but what it allows my customers / business users to be able to do with it.

[Autopilot]

aaron_2000 said:

Autopilot said:

Can I ask how old you are and what your current work experience looks like? You mentioned school, revision and GCSE's and while I did all those things (like you, I skipped some of the revision ), if discussing work stuff, I'd typically mention the roles / projects / places I've been at, so am assuming that you're quite young and have limited commercial experience of working in IT? This isn't a negative, just trying to understand where you're coming in from and could of course be wrong on all assumptions.

I'm 21, I spent some time pursuing cyber security but couldn't get myself interested in it, the same with performance testing. It's why I started the thread so I can get a real understanding of where I need to go and what I should be doing from people who've already built their careers as opposed to just starting out. I was lucky to work in a few decent fixed term contract IT jobs that weren't very specialised but helped me figure out how the different departments worked and how to work within the environment. Would you say that being young and starting out is both a big positive and a large negative from an employability point of view?

I'd agree and say yes, being young in your case is a positive and a negative. The positive part comes in bucket loads, you're obviously very driven, want to do well and are happy to put yourself through training to get there, you sound like the kind of guy who will make this work. The negative part of your age is that to be an architect takes time and experience so isn't typically something you start in, it's more of a thing you work your way towards. There are Graduate schemes and the Government Apprenticeship Levy will put people through training so you get the best of both worlds. As one of the other posts mentioned, these can accelerate your career and get you there faster so a route well worth looking in to.

[aaron_2000]

Autopilot said:

aaron_2000 said:

Autopilot said:

Can I ask how old you are and what your current work experience looks like? You mentioned school, revision and GCSE's and while I did all those things (like you, I skipped some of the revision ), if discussing work stuff, I'd typically mention the roles / projects / places I've been at, so am assuming that you're quite young and have limited commercial experience of working in IT? This isn't a negative, just trying to understand where you're coming in from and could of course be wrong on all assumptions.

I'm 21, I spent some time pursuing cyber security but couldn't get myself interested in it, the same with performance testing. It's why I started the thread so I can get a real understanding of where I need to go and what I should be doing from people who've already built their careers as opposed to just starting out. I was lucky to work in a few decent fixed term contract IT jobs that weren't very specialised but helped me figure out how the different departments worked and how to work within the environment. Would you say that being young and starting out is both a big positive and a large negative from an employability point of view?

I'd agree and say yes, being young in your case is a positive and a negative. The positive part comes in bucket loads, you're obviously very driven, want to do well and are happy to put yourself through training to get there, you sound like the kind of guy who will make this work. The negative part of your age is that to be an architect takes time and experience so isn't typically something you start in, it's more of a thing you work your way towards. There are Graduate schemes and the Government Apprenticeship Levy will put people through training so you get the best of both worlds. As one of the other posts mentioned, these can accelerate your career and get you there faster so a route well worth looking in to.

I have seen graduate schemes before but I always thought they were just for people that are fresh out of uni, same with higher level apprenticeships

fizzwheel said:

TOGAF - I found it intensive, there are two exams, the first one I found hardest as its a "closed book" exam so you really have to know the subject matter, the second one is easier as they give you a "business scenario" then ask you to make a recommendation based on 4 possible answers and that one is open book so you can look at the TOGAF reference materials when sitting it.

Once you understand the terminology and how to apply it, its reasonably straightforward, but if you're going into it cold with no "architecture" experience you may well find it harder.

Sounds to me like you don't really know what you want to do, that's fine I was the same when I was 21, also sounds to me like you like the "engineering" side i.e. building things, deploying systems etc, as an architect I don't really do that anymore. I look at the business requirements, and then write down the design which is then given to somebody else to go and deploy. Unless it's completely new tech then I have to write the design then do the actual deployment as well.

So be mindful if its hands on engineering you want, depending the setup of the company an architect might be hands on or they might not be. I've had colleagues join my team because they wanted to be an architect, but they also wanted to be hands on and build environments and servers and that's not necessarily a given that it will work out that way.

I think AWS and or Azure are the cloud technologies I would be wanting to look at if I were you, my advice again here is don't specialise in just one thing, if you want to be an Architect it will serve you better in the long run if you have a good understanding of a lot of technologies. But my guiding principle is that it's not the technology itself that is important but what it allows my customers / business users to be able to do with it.

Going into the client side of things, i.e liaising with them and guiding them through the process into stepping into cloud technologies, how do you find that compared to the more hands on roles in terms of enjoyment, challenge and fulfilment?

[fizzwheel]

aaron_2000 said:

Going into the client side of things, i.e liaising with them and guiding them through the process into stepping into cloud technologies, how do you find that compared to the more hands on roles in terms of enjoyment, challenge and fulfilment?

Personally for me that is the best part of my role, it's also the most challenging side of it. But again I tend to steer them away from the technology decisions, I sit them down and get them to explain to me what they want, what they're trying to do and what the business benefit is.

Once they've told me what they want in terms of functionality then I start to talk about the best way to deliver that functionality if that's a Cloud / SaaS / IaaS or PaaS service that is the best fit, then that's what we do, if an on premise system is the best fit, then that's what I'll recommend.

But I also have to think about how it will "run" once its been deployed so I'm looking at the technology stack and ensuring that once its gone live the support teams etc will be able to support it and whether they'll need training on it etc etc as part of the deployment.

Building servers / networks and deploying applications i.e. the engineering side doesn't really interest me anymore, mostly because I've spent the last 25 + years doing just that and ( this will sound cocky ) there isn't really any challenge in it. Whereas getting a stakeholder to explain to me what they want and then producing the design to deliver those requirements I find much more interesting and more rewarding when the project completes and it all goes live and you see the business users using it and either the additional revenue that project said it would generate begins to come in or the cost saving the project said it would deliver is actually delivered.

Personally, I think architecture, its 90% listening and influencing skills and 10% technology... but as i said, this really about you working towards ending up in a role that really suits you and I have worked with people before who thought they wanted to be an architect and then got themselves into that role and then found out it wasn't really what they wanted to do.

[aaron_2000]

fizzwheel said:

Personally for me that is the best part of my role, it's also the most challenging side of it. But again I tend to steer them away from the technology decisions, I sit them down and get them to explain to me what they want, what they're trying to do and what the business benefit is.

Once they've told me what they want in terms of functionality then I start to talk about the best way to deliver that functionality if that's a Cloud / SaaS / IaaS or PaaS service that is the best fit, then that's what we do, if an on premise system is the best fit, then that's what I'll recommend.

But I also have to think about how it will "run" once its been deployed so I'm looking at the technology stack and ensuring that once its gone live the support teams etc will be able to support it and whether they'll need training on it etc etc as part of the deployment.

Building servers / networks and deploying applications i.e. the engineering side doesn't really interest me anymore, mostly because I've spent the last 25 + years doing just that and ( this will sound cocky ) there isn't really any challenge in it. Whereas getting a stakeholder to explain to me what they want and then producing the design to deliver those requirements I find much more interesting and more rewarding when the project completes and it all goes live and you see the business users using it and either the additional revenue that project said it would generate begins to come in or the cost saving the project said it would deliver is actually delivered.

Personally, I think architecture, its 90% listening and influencing skills and 10% technology... but as i said, this really about you working towards ending up in a role that really suits you and I have worked with people before who thought they wanted to be an architect and then got themselves into that role and then found out it wasn't really what they wanted to do.

As much as I enjoy getting my hands dirty, I also really enjoy dealing with people and working them through a process. I've got a lot of thinking to do about what paths to pursue I think. Appreciate all of the help and advice