Would you like to learn the difference between a cloud architect and a solutions architect?
If so, 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 discuss
cloud architects, solution architects, and enterprise architects, but we'll also touch
the cloud engineer, and I'll tell you why.
There's just so much confusion in the various types of cloud computing roles, especially
confusion between cloud architects and cloud engineers, but also between the cloud architect
and the solution architect, and now we've got this other type of architect for which
I worked as is a long time, which is an enterprise architect and it just causes so much confusion.
If you don't know exactly what's in the role, you're not going to know how to prepare for
that role, which is going to make it hard to start your cloud computing career, or your
cloud architect career, or your solutions architect career. So we want to make sure
that you have all the tools so you can get the cloud architect, or the cloud computing,
or the cloud engineer, or a solution architect role of your dreams.
So let's begin by discussing the cloud engineer. The cloud engineer is the most deeply technical
person of the bunch. The cloud engineer is someone that's going to know all the depth
about how an individual service in the cloud works. So for example, if we were talking
about AWS S3, that cloud engineer is going to know all about S3 in extreme depth, and
they're going to know how to configure everything, all the features and functionality. That's
the cloud engineer. It is a deeply, deeply, deeply technical role, but it's deeply technical
on building things, and it's going to be focused on the specific services of the cloud provider.
That's what the cloud engineer does.
Now as we move up from this deeply technical role, certain things become more important.
Communication skills are going to become more important. Executive presence is going to
become a more important. Presentation skills are going to become more important. Soft skills,
and empathy, and emotional intelligence. These skills are going to become increasingly important
as we start moving up the architect chain, but there's no role that's better or worse.
They're just different roles. So the cloud architect, deeply, deeply technical, focused
on configuring and building certain services of the cloud provider.
So now let's talk about the solution architect. The solution architect is a systems designer.
So the systems designer is going to meet with clients. It's going to be a customer facing
role. They're going to ask business, legal, and technical, and regulatory questions, and
they're going to come up and design an architecture. The architecture that the solution architect
is going to design is going to be to optimize the business's performance through technology.
Now the thing with solution architects is they typically provide the solutions of a
single vendor. So a solution architect might work at a Cisco. They might work at an AWS.
They might work at a Google or an Azure. It doesn't matter. What they're going to be doing
is they're going to be designers of a solution that will use those things. So if a solution
architect works at AWS, they're going to give you an end-to-end design using AWS solutions,
and if they work for GCP, one of their solution architects as a rule is going to give you
an end-to-end design of one of the solutions on their cloud. That's what a solution architect
does. They are a designer. They are an architect of a single organization's specific solutions.
Now that may include other applications as well, but typically speaking, the solution
architect roles are single vendor and deeply technical. Well, not that technical, but they're
still pretty technical with regards to the depth of knowledge and the services of the
single vendor, but less technical in the knowledge of the entire business processes, less technical
in some of the business acumen that you might see, which is going to become more critically
important in other roles, and maybe they don't know necessarily as much about the network,
the data center, and the other cloud providers because they're focusing on a single cloud
provider and that's a solution architect. But the solution architect will have a lot
of depth of knowledge of the single vendors they're working on, far deeper than anyone
else, because that's their role.
Now this is moving up the business chain. Now as we move further up the business chain,
where we're going to have more business, more architecture, more overall knowledge of how
things work, we're going to have less depth of knowledge in the single vendor solution,
but more knowledge in terms of how do we design this end-to-end global system design. So the
next role is the cloud architect.
Now the cloud architect is a heavy design role. A person in this position is going to
start with the executives, maybe the CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO, work with the VPs, the directors
of IPs, the managers, the engineers, and the architects. They're going to ask a lot of
questions. They're going to then do an assessment. They're going to look around at applications,
and they're going to design a solution, an end-to-end solution, a global solution for
the business that's going to solve all the businesses challenges, or at least as many
as they can through the use of the technology. It might be multi-cloud solutions where you're
using multi-cloud providers. It could be keeping everything in the data center. It could be
doing something like running a Nutanix or an OpenStack cloud in the data center, and
then connecting it to a public cloud provider like AWS or GCP, for example.
The cloud architect knows how to do it all. It's a bigger business position, so it's going
to be much higher on the strategy focus for business, and it's going to be a little less
deep on the individual services of a cloud provider because the cloud architect now needs
to know everything all around for the global enterprise solution. So now you know that's
the main difference between that and a solution architect, but as we're moving into the cloud
architect roles, emotional intelligence, executive presence, knowing how to speak differently
to the CEO, the CIO, the CFO, the CTO, the COO, as well as the hiring managers, as well
as the directors, as well as all the direct reports, this role it's critical because you're
going to be a translator between business executives, engineers, and vice versa, and
it's a fantastic role with an incredible career potential because a cloud architect could
always work as a solution architect, but a solution architect is going to need a lot
more training to work as a cloud architect because they're going to need much more business
acumen, soft skills, emotional intelligence, and more overall system design.
Now the next type of architect we're going to talk about is the enterprise architect.
Now the enterprise architect and the cloud architect, these roles are getting really
confused right now, and that's why we're going to talk about them. As a rule, and I've worked
as an enterprise architect, the enterprise architect typically works on designing technology
solutions to improve the customer's business. It sounds a lot like a cloud architect. In
a lot of ways, it is but the enterprise architects focus is going to be a little bigger than
just the infrastructure. They're going to be looking at the application. They're going
to be looking at the infrastructure. They're going to be looking at the security. They're
going to be looking at the business needs. They're going to be looking for competitive
business advantage, and then they're going to work with the teams to try and build something
that'll do that.
So again, the enterprise architect is a system designer, but they're going to be more focused
on business, more focused on business strategy. So you can almost look at it as this diagonal
curve and if you look at the curve, you've got the cloud engineer that's the most deeply
technical on the services, the solution architect that is less technical, but more business-oriented
on the curve, but still has a lot of knowledge of the single vendor services. The cloud architect
is someone that knows all about the cloud and the overall system designs, but a lot
more business, and then the enterprise architect, which is going to include less technology
depth, but a whole lot more understanding of the business and how the technology can
improve the business.
So I hope we've answered your question on the difference between what is a solution
architect versus a cloud architect? What is a cloud engineer versus a cloud architect?
What is an enterprise architect versus a cloud architect? So we hope you understand this
because when you understand exactly the differences, you know how to study, and you can build the
cloud computing career of your dreams.
Please let me tell you about some free things we do for the cloud architect community. On
every Monday and every Thursday, we have an absolutely free how to get your first cloud
architect job. If you come to one of these free webinars, we will tell you everything
that's necessary to get your first job, what should be on your resume, how to pair things
that are important to hiring managers, so you can get hired. It's completely free. We
do it on Mondays and Thursdays. I'll leave a link in the description below.
Every Tuesday, we have a fun cloud architect experience webinar and on this webinar, we
talk about how you build the technical depth and competency to be capable to do your first
cloud architect job. It's a lot of fun. A lot of times, I give you guys architectures,
and you design them on the fly. People really have a good time, and they write me such grateful
emails afterwards saying how much they learn, and how much fun it was, and they want to
do another one. Can I do one soon? So we're going to do one almost every week, if we can,
and we're going to do it on Tuesdays. The link for the cloud architect experience webinar
is below.
Now most Wednesdays, not all, but most, when we have it time we do a free YouTube live
where you can ask us any cloud computing career questions and answers, and we'll answer them
live. So we do these typically speaking, most Wednesdays, a cloud architect career question
and answer session. You can ask for other cloud computing careers as well. We focus
on cloud architects, but if you want to know how to build your career, what to study, what
should be on your resume, we've been coaching and mentoring others for two decades, and
we're happy to have you on this call, and we'll do anything we can to help you.
Please keep a lookout. We are going to be doing a lot more live trainings for free on
YouTube. This week, we did a certified solution architect professional bootcamp, and thousands
of people attended, and we all had a great time. People asked me to do some networking
training, so we're going to do a lot more networking training coming very soon on YouTube
live. I'm one of the original Cisco certified internet experts. In fact, my number is 7417
from 20 plus years ago, so I'm super passionate about networking. As we all know, the cloud
is nothing more than a virtualized network in a data center from a function perspective,
so we'll teach a little more about the network.
Thank you so much for watching this video. We really appreciate your watching this video.
We are so grateful to be part of the cloud computing community. We love that we have
the opportunity to communicate with you on a frequent basis, so thank you for watching
this video. If you want any kind of videos, let us know, and we'll produce them for you
in the comments section below. Otherwise, thank you so much, and I'll see you on another
video very soon. Take care.