Are you an architect and spending a big chunk of your time planning & implementing cloud components for Digital Solution? Have you felt like the hostage of the cloud platform(s).
The Cloud
There was a time when cloud used to mean rain or the possibilities of rain. Today, if you are not aware of the cloud and still work in the tech industry, you are draining opportunities.
In the last 15 years, cloud has become the cottage industry for building applications. Using cloud services – infrastructure services for hosting applications or using Cloud platform services (PaaS) to compose applications faster – has become a natural way to build, test and deploy applications. For planet scale, enterprise grade, 24×7 internet traffic applications.
Cloud has autoscaling of infrastructure, on-demand provisioning of VMs, containers, horizontal auto-scaling of container pods, horizontal scaling of cluster nodes, fault tolerance, monitoring of cloud components.
The success of cloud is reflected in the growth of the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) – AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, IBM.
Implication of the Success of Cloud
And the windfall success of cloud has led us – the Tech community – to believe that Cloud is the think that matters. And we had to spend a lot of time on the Cloud (many a times only on one cloud – depending on the setup we are working in) and that has led to the creation of Cloud specialist role. They have tremendous dexterity in handling the nuances of cloud services – where it is with hacks for Windows container security in AWS cloud to solving peer to peer connectivity between two subnets in GCP.
But while doing this we have been locked into thinking the ways Cloud service providers think, we have been suspending our actual Architecture thinking. In other words we have surrendered our strategic thinking for solution to the implementation thinking in using the cloud platform for building the solution.
And “Cloud” has become like the “Great Wall of China” – keeping the threats of jobs at bay.
A Different View as an Architect
My submission is that, Cloud is another technology and has a tremendous value proposition in reducing the cost, improving the scale, accelerating the building of solutions and manage them in clockwork precision. What we need is to join this power of cloud with the power of Architecture thinking. If Cloud provides the foundation, Architecture thinking will direct our thinking and efforts for creating a platform contributing for business outcome of the customer – from enhancing customer experience to optimize supply chains to harnessing new business frontiers
Architecture for Business Outcome
Architecture problem solving starts with Business Architecture and business outcomes
Business outcomes can be to enhance the experience of the end customers, to improve the efficiency of business operation, or reconfigure the value chain to pivot the business model – from product to services to platform based to subscription-based model.
And this strategic intent is reflected in the Architecture thinking for a business enterprise.
For example, say – we want to create a Digital backbone for a retail customer ecosystem. We need to look at customer experience, collection of data, analytics, feedback loop with customer; and conduct experiments after experiments to create most meaningful journey of the customer.
To solve this business problem, architecture choices are driven by the ways to orchestrate a set of technology elements to deliver a business outcome. And Cloud is merely one component in it.
There are number of decisions which are agnostic to whatever cloud we are using:
- Why should you build public API’s at all? (not – which API gateway we should use)
- What choices of portal solutions will optimize the customer experience? (not – how can we deploy a
- Do I really need a hybrid cloud solution (not – how can I implement one)
- How can I adopt the principles of disruption across value chain of the industry
A Better & Balanced Approach
Learn Cloud as a foundation platform
- Learn all layers of traditional cloud components – computing, network, storage, security
- Grasp the Cloud native components – containers and pass services
- Master DevOps, Logging, Monitoring,
- And become the best know Cloud Tech Architect.
Know the Cloud Agontic aspects of Architecture as well:
- Application Integration, data integration, process integration
- Differentiating skills – Value chain disruption, platform thinking, customer experience optimization, supply chain optimization,
- And develop premium skills – how to have a big picture view to orchestrate all above elements to deliver business outcome
Conclusion
Leverage Cloud foundations as well as the business architecture thinking. Make full use of both. Else you are leaving a lot of money on the table. For your customer, your own organization and for YOURSELF!