Cloud Solution Architect — My View

“Glorified Loyal Salesman to Cloud Service Provider”

My view on cloud is, it is more of a Delivery model. The Cloud service providers offer various competitive services to realize various business functions individually or in a combined form using their proprietary models.

These many years being a generic Enterprise Architect, I was offering solutions to my customer’s ask in a Business and Technology agnostic way. Yes, I did do product fitment analysis and suggested products and services aligning to the organization’s strategic road-map. Now, I am slowly adjusting to the model of Cloud driven world where I am analyzing every service offering of the customer opted Cloud Service Provider (CSP)and doing a fitment analysis and coming out with my Architecture.

With the advent of cloud driven delivery, the EA’s are forced to spare more time on Infrastructure ,Security, Operational & performance architectural segments than other architectural segments as much of the architectural patterns are driven by the offerings of CSP and their reference architectures.

Although I am a big fan of Serverless offerings considering the economic, scalable and available features, I have always cautioned my customer’s not to fall prey to the proprietary serverless models of CSPs which will bring-in tight coupling and portability issues.

Recently, I was offering a Solution to a Customer who opted for AWS driven solution delivery and I was constrained to look for the service offerings, related patterns & Support features of each of those services. With my age old generic solutioning thought process I was pushing myself to offer generic,portable solutions but then realized to reap the benefit of the cloud offerings of the service provider it is necessary to go with their specialized services. Slowly I feel I am getting converted to a CSP specialist from a generalist.

As the industry has matured it started naming Kubernetes certified specialists as DevOps specialists and similarly, the Cloud certified will soon be called as either infrastructure specialists or CSP cloud specialists than an Architect.

My learning curve becomes steep when I offer solution to a customer who is opting for multi-cloud, multi-service provider, SaaS product offerings. Reason being the amount of frequent changes/improvements happening in the CSP services. As an EA, I have always performed the task of continuous improvement,continuous evaluation, continuous governance, continuous feedback and continuous fitment and alignment analysis but CSPs are now forcing me to increase the frequency of it as they are also attaining continuous maturity.

For the Certified, the CSPs are offering a validity period of 3 years with the advancements & competition I feel the validity of the certificates will come down to a year. Although we have Containerized models and Kubernetes and other frameworks to introduce the so called portability but still until unless the service offerings from each of these CSPs are brought under standard models, the tight coupling /dependency on the CSPs will continue to increase and customer’s will be forced to remain with the same vendor.

I am hoping that things will change in future !