Are you AWS certified, Azure certified, or Google certified and struggling to
get your first cloud architect job or solution architect job, then if so this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I am the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects,
and we're an organization that's dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
Personally, I've been working in technology for over 25 years and I've been coaching others to
get their first tech job or get promoted in tech for over two decades. And every day when one of my
cloud architect students tells me they get cloud hired, it's the best feeling in the world for me.
So I want to help you get cloud hired too. So in order to help you get that
first cloud architect job, what I need you to first understand is, what's wrong
with solution architect certification training? Well, if you wanted to be a cloud engineer,
there's not a lot wrong with it. It's a good start, a good start because,
what is certification training? It's basically the name of a manufacturer service,
because they all have marketing departments that make up creative names like elastic or cloud.
So we've got to map those names to what they actually are and how to configure those services,
and for the most part, that's what vendor certification is. If you're a junior engineer,
that's going to spend all day setting up cloud storage or S3 buckets or blob,
this is great training, but if you want to be a solution architect or a cloud architect
or an enterprise architect, this training is just a little better than irrelevant,
slightly relevant, but not relevant, and we're going to tell you why. But,
you still need the certification because it's going to get you an interview.
So all is not wasted, and we're going to show you how to leverage that certification
and then learn those cloud architect or solution architect things. So you can get
that first cloud architect job. So let's now talk about why this training is not relevant for us?
See we cloud architects, don't focus on the name of a service
and we don't configure those services. So why can't we do that?
We're big picture people. We cloud architects are about designing an end-to-end solution and I'll
talk much more about that. But when I design a solution that goes from the customer to the...
Well, I guess my cust... so the customer to wherever that data center or cloud is,
whatever it is from end-to-end I need to make sure that it all works and all those pieces in parts,
and I don't think of the names of the services at all. I think of the technologies that are
used or do I need low balancers? Do I need servers? Do I need applications? Do I need
a new business process to be defined? I don't have time to think of names of services. Now I
may be thinking I may need to use object storage because I need metadata in my storage environment.
I may have to think about that, and I may think I need a virtual machine here
or a Kubernetes cluster here. I'll definitely be thinking about that. But the actual name, it's
almost irrelevant to me and I am always going to design based upon architectural principles first,
which we'll talk about later and never vendor name of services because you have to think in the
language of what you're doing. So we'll talk about what that means later. So the main components
of our job as cloud architects or solution architects just aren't covered in certifications.
They don't prepare us for these roles. So, we're going to tell you what will,
in a minute, but we needed to find what do we do in these architect jobs first?
And we know exactly what we do, when we tell you exactly what you need, you'll understand
and you can get these skills and get these possessions with a laser-like focus, a lot
quicker than you could. 200% or 300% faster than you could, than if you were zigzagging around.
So we want you to know because these are really great jobs. I've loved mine. I've
been an architect for almost 25 years and I want you to have such a great career too. So
we think differently. Now we need technical knowledge. But what is our job? Our whole job
as an architect, our whole goal, our whole focus is this, to transform our customer's business.
Nope, I didn't say right about technology. Our goal as architects is to transform our customer's
business, to improve it. Now our tool is cloud architects, our technologies that can do it, cloud
technologies and other technologies. But our goal, the thing that we're focused on is transforming
that customer's business. So how do you transform a customer's business? Well, you have
to understand business. So in solution architect training, they don't discuss business. How can you
design a technology solution to improve someone's business unless you've been training on business?
So guess what? Learn some business.
So what does this mean? Learn how to evaluate an organization's financial performance,
learn how to read a financial statement and you can find out how to do that on the internet.
Learn the way you change the tools that a business can use. How can you increase sales? What tech
could do it, what inputs and outputs could company do? How could they improve employee productivity
to make employees be able to do more so they can use less resources or get more out of the people,
especially if they're struggling financially? How can an organization enhance collaboration
between its employees, to speed delivery of new projects? How can you transform
an organization with technology? But that's the goals. These are the things that we can impact.
Now, we also will be responding to requests for information, RFIs, we request for proposals, RFPs,
requests for quotes, RFQs, and we'll be doing some ROI modeling too,
because we need to show our customers that the value of the solution provided to them
is greater than its cost because customers don't buy technology, because they like it.
In fact, in 25 years of the business of technology and technology sales and architecture,
I don't know of any customer that said, Michael, I want to buy tech because it's cool.
Now as architects, nobody hands you a document, a case study that says design this, no one.
So how do we get this information? We have to ask the customer, how do you get the customer
business information? You ask the executives, how do you get the technology information? You
ask the engineers, the managers, the architects of your customer company. You ask, which means
you need to have stellar communication skills, and you need to know which questions to ask,
and you need to ask them efficiently, and you need to have really good listening
skills because you can't be asking the same questions a million times.
Now when you ask these questions, some of their going to be sensitive. Sometimes businesses have
made mistakes and you've got to ask them the deep business questions. And there's going to be
some people that have had some ruffled feathers and hurt feelings. You need to be emotionally
intelligent. Now when you walk in and say, I can help you. If you walk in there like this, hello,
my name is Mike today. No one's going to think you can help them but if you've got some executive
presence or gravitas and they can feel you and you look big, then they'll be more likely to listen to
you. So, these are the skills that the architect needs to develop. Presence is definitely there.
So, we have to learn these specialized communication skills and special questionnaire
type skills. For example, the students in our cloud architect career development program have
a list of 150 questions to ask customers. Specific questions under a certain time,
because you have to know what questions to ask. So make sure you know what kind of questions to ask
and you develop your communication skills, because these architecture jobs aren't possible without
communication skills. In fact, I did communication skills before technology for that reason. So what
tech do you need to know? Well, I told you it's not the name of a service and how to configure it,
but what is this tech? See tech is critical because tech is our tool. We need to learn
BGP for routing and OSPF at least a little bit because most organizations have an interrogative
protocol in their data center that connects to the cloud, and we need to understand the routing.
We need to understand VLANs, virtual LANs and VLAN tagging the 802.1Q tags for example
and VLAN trunking, and we need to understand network address translation, all the different
variations in IP addressing and subnetting and supernetting and route aggregation. We need to
understand how routing works, how switching works, how DNS... That's some of the things we need to
know in networking. This is our toolbox. Now we also need to understand security concepts, because
they're going to be part of our architecture, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention
system, VPN concentrators, that kind of thing. We'll be using it. And we're going to be using
server virtualization in everything we do. Containers, load balancers, storage types.
Identity and access management, otherwise known as AAA, authentication, authorization and accounting.
This kind of the... These are our skills, but we also need to know how the cloud works.
See, I mentioned previously, we don't think in terms of vendor names and services, we think in
terms of technology. So if I truly understand all these technologies, I know the cloud, but
you know what? That's not enough. On your cloud architect journey, build a cloud. I mean it, build
a cloud. Every one of our students does, build a cloud. So take a server or group of servers,
at least 16 cores, because you're going to need 64 Gigs of RAM or minimum for something like this,
but at least 16 cores and build a cloud on there, put a Nutanix Cloud on there, put an
Openstack Ansible cloud, get two or three of these servers, build the cloud, architect the cloud,
look at the control plane, look at the data plane. Once you do that, you will understand the inner
workings of the cloud and you will understand how this cloud, how this magical virtualized network
in a data center can transform your customer's business and improve their business performance.
You'll understand the tech, and then if you learn the business things with the tech,
you'll understand how the pieces and parts tie together. So let's talk a little bit more. Let's
talk about leadership skills, critical skills for the cloud architect. Again, not covered in
solution architect training. We are constantly leading teams. See architecture is a team sport.
There are people that think they're going to become a great architect by learning a little
of everything. Now that makes us a terrible architect, but then you have some depth.
What we need to know is, we need to know end-to-end system design.
So we need to build teams of experts... We know end-to-end system design, that's our world,
but you know what? There's going to be a security professional that knows a lot more of that, than
we do, and a networking professional that knows more about networking than we do,
and a database person that knows more about databases than we do,
and we want to put them together as a team. So as architects, enterprise architects,
cloud architects, solutions architects, we build teams and we go to our teams.
We need to know, who to know. We don't need to know how to do everybody else's job because when
we try to learn 10 people's job, we'll be bad at 10 people's jobs, we need to be good at our job.
So keep that in mind. Let's say you've got these data center skills and these networking skills
and these cloud skills and you're building your business skills. Good, good, good,
good, good. What else do you need? Well first, you need to learn to give great presentations.
Why? Well first, most good cloud architect interviews or solution architect interviews or
enterprise architect interviews will make you give a presentation just as part of the job interview.
So you can't get the job anyway without presentation practice and skills.
But even if you got the job, we have to present constantly in our job, and if you're not good
at it, if you're not trained at it, it won't come out well and you'll be nervous and you can't have
a job where you're uncomfortable and nervous all the time. What else do we need to learn?
We need to learn to be CXO relevant. What does the CEO care about versus the CFO versus the CIO?
They all have different needs. What does the VP of IT care about versus the director of IT care
about versus the manager of the voice network versus the engineers that are building the voice
network. We probably interact with all of them and we need to be relevant to each audience. So
we need to learn how to communicate differently to each audience and as architects we need to sell.
And that doesn't mean you necessarily have to be in a pre-sales role, but we architects sell
and we are always selling, when you're an architect and you get given a big project
and you need to go to your manager and say, I need these 10 engineers to work with me for the next
two weeks for a proof of concept, you've got to sell your manager on why you need them. When you
want your company to develop new features for a specific customer, because the customer requested
it. You need good sales skills. And when you create a design and you sell it to your customer,
you don't... if you don't have good sales skills, the customer will never adopt that, which means
all the transformation that you can give them is lost. So sale skills are really critical.
Now writing skills. As architects, we meet with our client, we ask some questions,
we baseline their systems, we develop an architecture and then we write it up.
So we've got to be able to write something that is easy to read,
that can have all the details that it needs, that can be short for the executives,
where the executive wants to rate it and as detailed oriented as the engineers might need. So
we're going to get very deep here and very shallow and we're going to have to communicate everywhere
in between. So we need to be able to learn to write for all of those audiences. Now we also need
our business acumen. So work on those business skills. These are the skills that make your great
cloud architect. These are the skills that make you a great solution architect and these are the
skills that make you a great enterprise architect. And now when you think about it, when you think,
how do we transform a business by taking something from the network in the data center to the cloud.
Now think about it. If you understand their business, you know how to improve their business.
If you understand their network in the data center, you understand everything they have.
If you understand the cloud, you know how to take it to the cloud and you know the best
parts of the cloud to improve their business, and if you can get the right information, you
can build that design and make it perfect. If you can present it and sell it back to the customer,
they'll build it. The customer's business is transformed. You had a customer victory
and there goes your cloud architect career, that's already sailing upwards in the right direction.
You want a great cloud architect job, solution architect job. Now you know what to do.
This is Michael Gibbs. I am the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects. It's been an honor
to see you here, today and I look forward to seeing you in another video. Take care.
It was so nice having you join us for this video today. Let me tell you about some free services
we do for the cloud community. Once per week, we actually have a free question and answer session
on live, on YouTube. We can come, and ask us any questions you want about building your career
related to cloud computing or networking and we'll answer them in real time for you,
because we want to get you to your goals. Several more times per week, we have guests from industry,
industry experts that I have known for decades, that are movers and shakers,
that have changed the world, that can give you information so you can build the best career. I
invite them periodically. They are on my show. If there's a chance to do some free training on our
channel, we'll do it live because we want you all to have the best skills for the best career. So
please subscribe and hit the bell. I look forward to seeing you and I look forward to assisting you
in your technology career. Thank you so much. This is Michael Gibbs from Go Cloud Architects.