Your journey to the cloud is almost like your journey to a wonderland in the middle of nowhere where you have to travel with all your needs while you are in wonderland via all sorts of terrain on your way to wonderland and every single living things try not to get you to pass them!
It all depends on how long you have to travel to reach your wonderland, how bigger is your crew, what are their needs to support your journey and more than anything how to keep you all safe while you are travelling to the wonderland and while you are in wonderland.
Let’s come back to the cloud world from the wonderland, your journey to the cloud is determined by:
- Your size and needs of your organisation
- The technology, processes and skills available in your organisation
- Appetite for risk to your organisation
These factors determine, which roles or collection of roles below are required for your respective cloud programme.
- Stakeholders and Operational Owners
- Programme and Delivery Management
- Cloud Architecture
- Cloud Security
- Cloud Engineering
- DevOps
- Reliability
The first two areas of roles are not anything specific to the cloud and are not expected to be specific to the cloud.
- Stakeholders and Operational Owners
- Senior Leadership
- Product Manager / Owner (Business and Technical)
- Programme and Delivery Management
- Programme Manager / Project Manager
- Scrum Lead / Delivery Lead
Let’s talk about the roles that are specifically required for your Cloud Journey.
Cloud Architecture
The Cloud is already architected by the Cloud providers, then what’s the need for the Cloud Architecture type roles for your Cloud Journey? Are you looking to work for a Cloud Provider?
If you are looking to work for Cloud Providers, the type of roles they need may drastically be different and will be really specialised for each of the services that they offer, so we won’t try to describe the roles for Cloud providers here.
Let’s talk about your roles if you are looking to use Cloud as a customer.
Enterprise Architect – Cloud
The person/role who works with Senior Leadership and other stakeholders to come up with Cloud Strategy, Architecture and Guiding Principles for Cloud Journey that takes your organisation in the right direction.
This role is also supposed to test their deliverables with the cloud subject matter experts and subject matter experts in the broader technology ecosystem.
You are expected to have a broader understanding of your organisation’s business strategy and technology strategy as well as forward-thinking towards the transformation of the same using Cloud technologies.
This is really a critical role for your organisation as, without a clear strategy and direction, your organisation’s cloud journey may not be successful.
Platform Architect
The person who designs the foundational services for the Cloud platform in their organisation, so there will be network connectivity, a secure landing zone for application workloads and customised services to integrate with organisations enterprise capabilities.
This role requires cross-functional skills across pretty much all technology landscapes in their organisation that the Cloud platform needs to integrate according to agreed standards.
If you have come from an infrastructure, networking, security or integration background it may help to move into this Platform Architect role as this role will be considering all those domains as part of the Cloud Platform ecosystem.
Solution Architect
The person designs the application to integrate with the Cloud ecosystem and enterprise services provided by the Cloud platform. They make sure the application workload is compliant with architecture principles and security policies.
You are expected to know the application problem domain, the technologies used within the application regardless of whether it’s a COTS or bespoke solution and their dependencies to function in any environment.
In this role, your focus will be more on solving the specific business problem rather than holistically enabling Cloud Platform for your organisation.
Cloud Architect
This role is a cross-functional role that can go across the Platform Architect and Solution Architect as an extended role to bring Cloud expertise into the architecture practice.
The Cloud Architect is expected to know most of the core cloud services within a given cloud provider and will be able to do hands-on coding where it’s required.
There is a slim line between the Cloud Architect and Cloud Engineer role when you most of the time end up doing coding instead of designing.
But this also provides an opportunity for Cloud Engineers to step into the Architecture discipline as compared to other domains, Cloud Architecture won’t be challenging if you are already a Cloud Engineer, it comes down to understanding the discipline of Architecture more than Cloud.
Cloud Data Architect
This role is a new trend in the industry with data experts with non-cloud experience entering the Cloud environment, the way we treat our data on-premise is not the same in Cloud and hence the introduction of this role.
The data is the organisation’s main asset when it comes to Cloud, which means that needs to be well protected and maintained more than the cloud infrastructure itself.
The Cloud Data Architect will focus on making use of Cloud data services to load, process and store data while still following industry best practices around data modelling, data ingestion, data handling, data processing and presentation.
DevOps Architect
This person designs the DevOps tooling around CI/CD in the Cloud platform. This includes the source control, artifact repository, CI/CD automation tools and processes associated to provide complete automation in Cloud.
You are expected to come from a strong DevOps hands-on background with greater motivation into making use of cloud-native services.
Your expertise is to help design and provide facilities to do DevOps in Cloud for platform and application workload teams, so each one of them doesn’t have to come up with their own way of doing DevOps in the Cloud.
Cloud Security Architect
Enabling security framework, certification of cloud services within the cloud platform, secure identity and access and secure connectivity are all part of the Cloud Security Architect’s role.
For a smaller organisation, usually, the Platform Architect is expected to assume this role as well therefore it’s absolutely important to have security expertise in Cloud if you like to be a Platform Architect or Security Architect in Cloud.
You are expected to come from a strong security consultation background, be familiar with industry-standard security frameworks such as NIST and CIS and be aware of the security framework within your own business domains.
Cloud Network Architect
This role designs the networking from on-premise to Cloud, to and from Internet and connectivity required to integrate other services within their organisation.
In order to be successful in this role, you will need to have a deeper understanding of TCP/IP, BGP and DNS as well as familiar with network devices and how they are interconnected.
In addition, you will also need to have expertise in Cloud network services including Hub/Spoke model, Virtual Private Cloud, Endpoint Interfaces and Gateway network patterns.
Cloud Security
When you are using the public cloud it’s absolutely critical to understand your responsibility in the cloud as a customer, which is highlighted in the shared responsibility model of the respective cloud provider.
Cloud Security Consult
You should have good exposure to industry-standard security frameworks, best practices, threat modelling and risk assessment techniques at the same time, and have a great understanding of your organisation’s risk appetite and security posture.
This role is critical in terms of maintaining the security standards for the Cloud that are applicable for their organisation closely working with wider IT security consultants.
In fact, this role is the custodian of such standards and makes sure all cloud environments are compliant with those standards.
This role operates in an advisory role capacity rather than an operational role and may involve external security advisors for specialised services.
Cloud Security Advisor
This role is normally brought as a reinforcement role to supplement the Cloud Security Consultant role, where this role is expected to bring expertise around industry-standard security practices, frameworks and expertise around cloud security.
It’s quite normal for this type of role was brought in the early stages of cloud adoption to build the Cloud security foundation, processes and even codified automation to help out the Cloud Security Consult and Cloud DevSecOps.
Cloud Engineering
Cloud Engineering is an extended practice of software engineering with cloud infrastructure as the piece of software and a template to create cloud infrastructure as the code for the piece of software.
If you have come from a software development background and have the motivation to learn about Cloud, this discipline is the best fit for you.
Cloud DevOps
This role is no different from the standard DevOps role, where the “you own what you developed even in production” model with the extension of Cloud infrastructure coming into the scope of DevOps other than the software that runs on top of the infrastructure.
You are expected to understand the cloud native template code development, any generic template code development such as Terraform and your application software development language code.
You are also expected to be familiar with SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) with an extension in Cloud as Infrastructure Development Life Cycle.
You are passionate about automation and do not do anything manually unless by exception when it comes to infrastructure or software build and deployment.
Cloud DevSecOps
This is an extension of the Cloud DevOps role with more focus on security tooling, security controls, security monitoring and security event response.
You are expected to build the security guardrails around the infrastructure, software and data that are present in the public cloud but owned by your organisation.
You work with Cloud Security Architect and Consultant to make sure your security controls and processes are in line with your organisation’s security standards.
Cloud Reliability
The actual reliability of the Cloud is the responsibility of your Cloud provider, so why is this role?
If you are deploying Cloud resources (e.g. Cloud Infrastructure) into the Cloud the responsibility of that infrastructure including the reliability belongs to you as a customer and not to the cloud provider, are responsibly for all those resources.
You are tasked with building observability around your infrastructure and software that runs on the selected cloud provider, make sure they are in line with your internal and external SLAs and always make sure it’s the case.
Your role!
It’s absolutely important to understand your current role, your motivation, your ultimate destiny, and your required skills and experience before you land on a cloud role, just like any other role.
But the key difference with all cloud roles is that you always have to keep on top of the changes coming on your way as the cloud providers are always faster than individuals like yourself when it comes to releasing new services and features.
Choose your next steps towards your ultimate wonderland (Cloud Journey)!
Designed 4 Cloud Limited 