To become a cloud architect, you need to have more people skills in contrast to technical skills, while tech skill is important too as we are dealing with the tech, people skills are essential in becoming a good architect.
so what do architects do?
- design, document, sell
- lead, translate, customer relationship management
- project management, client entertainment
1. Design (by understanding the business)
system design, end-to-end design. build based on inputs from client:
- business goals/objectives?
- pain points?
- vision?
- are there other competitors and what are they doing?
- budget?
2. Documentation
25% of the work is documenting.
easy to understand document for non-tech executives.
deep technology document for tech people.
3. Sell
Must have sales skills. selling solutions to customers. selling internal management to say we need manpower. Sell to upper management to implement solution.
Risk, Cost, Propose, get Buy Ins
4. Lead
architects are director levels or above positions.
leading and managing other people's employees.
5. Translate
need to have the business acumen/knowledge to be able to translate the input from client side into tech solution.
ask questions, get the baseline of the client's organization current systems.
bring in a team of cloud engineers to baseline the systems (what are their CPU and Memory utilization, how many systems, etc.) therefore cloud engineers need more knowledge on how to do the things
6. Customer relationship management
You're only as strong as your weakest link in your team.
7. Project Management
as an architect, you basically are managing alot of different projects.
each project will have a PoC, a it needs to be done, thus you will require good project managment skills because on top of PoC, you might be needing to do manage a third-party solution such as Cisco or Fortinet to help design for your customer, a better solution.
8. Entertain Clients
Lunch and dinners to entertain clients. develop deep relationship with clients cause sometimes you are on a 16-hour project so you will need some time to talk.
