If you're confused by cloud architect job descriptions, this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the founder and CEO of GoCloud Architects,
and we're an organization dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
I've been working in technology for over 25 years and I've been coaching and mentoring others for
well over two decades. Today we're going to talk about cloud architect job descriptions.
The reason we wanted to make a video on cloud architect job descriptions,
we got asked every day by people when they're looking for their first cloud architect job,
they say, "What do we do? These cloud architect job descriptions,
what should we study? Because, they all look different." That is not an uncommon question,
and the reason we're making this video is we're going to talk about what a cloud architect job
description actually is, as well as how we think some of these cloud architect job descriptions
have gotten so crowded away. So ambiguous and including everything, including the kitchen sink,
which would never be possible for any one person to master.
So, let's first just define the four main roles that are in the cloud.
You've got a cloud architect, which is a systems designer. Cloud architects design systems to meet
an organization's needs, design position, and it's a cross between an engineering position
and a business executive position. That is what a cloud architect does. They design systems,
they don't build them. They don't configure them. They don't manage them. They design them.
By comparison, a cloud engineer is a builder. So after the cloud architect designs the solution,
somebody has to go build it, and that's the cloud engineer. A cloud engineer is a deeply,
deeply, deeply technical role in terms of building the systems. That's a cloud engineer.
The next common cloud job is called sysops or sysops. Sysops is basically operations,
and sysops people maintain the cloud that the cloud engineers built.
So the cloud architect designs it, the cloud engineer builds it, and then the cloud sysop
person maintains it. So, the sysops people have to be really good with scripting, and automation,
and Terraform, those kinds of things, because they are the maintainers of the system. Now,
the last role that we'll talk about is devops and where in this case,
we're going to be talking about cloud devops, and that's really about
improving the software delivery cycle. So, that's what those folks do, and when you look at these
cloud architect job descriptions or solution architect job descriptions, they can be all
over the place and rarely are they specific. So, we're going to help you figure it out. Let's start
with how organizations are structured so you can understand the way we're going to describe this.
Organizations begin with the CEO who sets the strategy for the organization. Underneath the CEO,
they have a chief information officer who basically meets the CEOs business strategy through
the use of technology, information technology to be specific, who typically has a VP of it
who typically has a director of it, who has the manager of it, who's usually the hiring manager
for first-line cloud architects. So if you want to know exactly what a cloud architect does and what
should be in a cloud architect job description, take it from the CIO. So Gartner, an organization
that does evaluations of technology trends and future state, and what's needed in technology,
did just that. See, all these cloud architect job descriptions were really, really,
really ambiguous, so somebody wanted to clean it up. Gartner did a wonderful survey of CIOs,
and since CIOs set the strategy for what cloud architects do in their organizations,
this is your specific cloud architect job description. This was published
in CIO Magazine. I will leave the link in the description below so you can see it for yourself.
According to what was published in CIO Magazine, which is consistent,
which is what we've trained with people forever and the way we've worked as architects forever,
what Gartner said and CIO Magazine is that a cloud architect leads the cultural change
for cloud adoption. The cloud architect develops and coordinates a cloud architecture. This means
designed, and the cloud architect develops a cloud strategy and coordinates the adoption process.
The next thing the Gartner said, and that was just published in CIO,
is that according to CIOs cloud architects help find talent with the necessary skills,
they assess applications, software, and hardware, they create a cloud broker team. They select cloud
providers and vet third-party services, and then they work closely with the IT security people
to make sure the security systems are there. They manage budgets, and operate [inaudible 00:04:14].
So you can see what the cloud architect is doing. It is a design position, and because it's a design
position, that's exactly what it works. Now, we think what goes on when we see some of these job
descriptions is the following, and we're actually going to demonstrate one case for this exactly.
Most of us hiring managers, we are not experts at writing job descriptions. In fact, we hate it and
we're terrible at it. So what do a lot of us do? If we see a job and we need a job description and
it's like, "Hmm, let me go to the favorite job board and let me cut and paste the job
description, bring it into Word or Google Docs," or whatever you're using to write your documents,
"Keep all that stuff because it looks remarkably comprehensive, and then add our own stuff." I do
that, and then I submit my thing. Let's say, I use Indeed, ZipRecruiter. It doesn't matter. The next
person that comes in needs a cloud architect in there, and they're not sure what they do either.
So what do they do? They take mine, and mine had basically somebody else's plus mine. They look
at it and they say, "Wow, I need a little more security. I'm going to add all these
security things," and then they save it and then they post it, and the next person does it,
and the next person does it. When we now look at some of these cloud architect job descriptions,
they're sysops jobs, devops jobs, application architect jobs. You know, it's hard to find. So,
we told you exactly what CIOs desire cloud architects, and that's going to work.
Now we're going to read several cloud architect job descriptions. Now the first cloud architect
job description we're going to read is one by Healthesystems that we found on Indeed.
We feel this to be an absolutely accurate, high quality cloud architect job description.
As I mentioned, organizations often do cutting and pasting. If you hear some of these things,
they may sound a whole lot like what was published in CIO Magazine. So, we're not saying they did any
cutting and pasting, but some of the words are nearly identical, which means at least this CIO
is in tune with what other CIOs are suggesting and what they want for a cloud architect.
So since this is a technology company and they know exactly what they need,
let's hear what they talk about under key responsibilities.
The first thing they say is, "Lead the cultural change for cloud adoption."
It's exactly what was published in CIO Magazine. Then they say, "Influence culture, changing
behaviors towards the adoption of cloud services." Very similar to what we heard from CIO Magazine.
Then they said, "Inspire a culture that resists the urge to do business as usual," because they
want to use technology and innovate. Then they say, "Lead an organization
to adopt and incorporate cloud computing, and directly in a cost effective manner." Again,
this is fantastic for a cloud architect. Then they say. "Develop and coordinate a
cloud architecture." Again, makes sense because it's a designer. Then they talk about refine and
coordinate the cloud adoption strategy. Makes sense. They talk about working with stakeholders
to identify and articulate when to leverage cloud services and when not to. That means the executive
team. Then they talk about developing a process which IT and business can easily select the
appropriate resource for the right technology for their solution. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
Then they talk about creating an evaluation criteria for selecting
cloud providers and services, and they talk about collaborating with stakeholders,
and they talk about working with subject matter expert stakeholders, and I could go on.
This is a brilliant cloud architect job description,
and it's exactly what a cloud architect would do. Now, when we searched cloud architect,
solution architect popped up a lot, and we're not really a fan of the term solution architect
because the solution architect could be anything. I've seen dentists use that term,
I've seen networking people use that term. I've seen application architects use that term. I've
seen anybody in any industry use the term solution architects, so we prefer being more specific,
but solution architect is a commonly used term. So, let's look at the different types of solution
architects that pop up when you actually type cloud architect in a search engine. The next
one is from Salesforce, and again, another great technology company. They know what their solutions
architects or cloud architects need to do, and here's what they posted in their job description.
They want their solution architect to support the successful integration, data, design, security,
and execution of a company CRM strategy. Then they said, "Maintain data integrity," makes sense,
"And manage data inputs and outputs for client marketing campaigns." Makes sense.
They're a designer of things that are in use with their business. Then it says, "Lead the
design and development of new initiatives," and then it says, "Provide leadership
for best practice standards and frameworks for all programs and platforms it pertains to.
Again, exactly what an architect would do, and it talks about the consulting side,
where you participate in complex discussions with key stakeholders, partners, or technology teams.
Then they talk about the ability to advise and work with others. Again, this is a real
solution architect, cloud architect type job description. Note, in all of these descriptions
you never heard configure the management constantly, you never heard configure the
CLI. You didn't hear anything about writing Python scripts or Terraform or automation.
Not because these are not valuable skills, they're critical skills in the cloud computing world.
They're just not what architects do. They're what engineers do versus sysops versus devops people.
So, you've got to make sure you have the right one. I'm going to read you another job
description, and this is for TekPartners. They're a tech recruiting company, and when I first read
this description on their cloud architect, it showed up as solution architect. So I read it
and I looked at this and as I'm reading through this, I couldn't figure out what it was.
First, it looked like a software developer and then it looked like a devops position,
but it was listed under solution architect,
which was listed under cloud architect. So I looked at it and said, "What is it?"
This is what they listed. They listed technologies. Java, Vanilla,
ES6, Node.js, Node.js server frameworks, Python, Python two, Python three, Reslet Frameworks. They
talked about data management. They talked about relational databases, non-relational databases,
git, and they talked about command line proficiency, and Gooey tools, and command
line. They talked about scripting, specifically Bash shell. They talked about CI/CD pipelines,
Linux systems administrations. I kept reading and I kept saying, "This is not a cloud architect.
This is an application architect or a devop. It's hard to tell." So I read the job description
three or four more times, and I finally found it. It says solution architect-applications.
That, again, made it a good job description for the positions. See, TEKsystems been around for
a while. They know what they're doing, they're in a recruiting environment. So when you're reading
these cloud architect job descriptions, just be really careful because you type cloud architect,
something else pops up, and there's going to be a little dash in there and that's the only
way you're going to be able to differentiate many of these cloud architect job descriptions.
We hope we've provided you some information on cloud architect job descriptions so you actually
know what to do, because if you want to be a cloud architect, again, it's either a customer
facing role, it's a design role, and it's not a configuration role. We find that what keeps a lot
of cloud architects from getting to their goals is they're so busy focused on Python scripting,
or other things that are not related to their job, that they don't have the skill
set they need to function as a cloud architect because they're too busy training for sysops, or
devops, or cloud engineers. We're suggesting that you focus on training for the job that you want
and not other jobs that are interesting in the industry, but not related to the job you want.
I hope you've enjoyed this video on cloud architect job descriptions, and if you'd
let me tell you about some things we do for the cloud architect community,
on Monday and Thursday, we have a free how to get your first cloud architect job webinar,
and on these free webinars, we teach you what you need to learn. We teach you the skills that
are necessary. We teach you exactly what hiring managers desire, things to do in your interview,
things to learn so you can have a great cloud computing career. We do that free on every
Monday and every Thursday. Now, every Tuesday we have a cloud architect experience webinar,
and we talk about how to get the real kinds of experience that you can put on your resume
that organizations desire you to be able to hire you for a cloud architect or a cloud engineer job.
We do this completely free. We do it every Tuesday, and a lot of times we have these
live architecture challenges where we do a lot of free training on these same things. We have you
and work with you build architectures on multiple cloud providers for various technology challenges.
We do this completely free every Tuesday. The link is in the description below. Most Wednesdays,
if we have time, but not all because we're pretty busy, but most we do a YouTube Live, and on these
YouTube Lives, you can bring us anything related to any cloud architect or cloud computing career
questions. What we'll do is we'll work with you, we'll ask you some questions, and we will help
point you in the right direction based upon the things that you ask us to make you have
the best cloud computing career. Again, we do that completely free and we do that most Wednesdays.
We are holding an AWS certified solution architect professional bootcamp. It'll
be on June 15th to June 20th, 2021, and it will be a complete and free training program.
If you're watching this video after that, don't worry,
I'll leave the link to that complete course in the description below. We also have a completely
free certified solution architect associate course. The link is in the description below,
and of course to go along with the course, no course is really complete without a book. So,
we have a completely free AWS certified solution architect associate ebook.
The link is in the description below. Thank you so much for watching this video. It's a real pleasure
to become part of the cloud computing community or the cloud architect community, or both.
I take it as an honor and a privilege to be able to speak with you as often as I do. Thank
you so much for watching this video, and I look forward to seeing you in another video very soon.