Don’t neglect your IT architect skills in public cloud projects
The expectation that public cloud-based applications will operate without careful planning and design on your part leads to failure. In reality, a lot of the logical data center and network design required for on-premises IT is still necessary for public cloud success.
For IT architects, there are numerous requirements around public cloud, as well as hybrid cloud deployments. Brush up on IT architect skills around such critical areas as high availability, connectivity and data security — with some adjustments from server room to cloud portal. And because most IT organizations deploy on one or more public clouds, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or Oracle Cloud, these IT architecture skills apply wherever your IT organization chooses to go.
An essential element of the IT architect’s job is to accommodate an environment’s constraints to deliver applications that fulfil business requirements. In public cloud platforms, failure models differ greatly from those on premises. For example, AWS advises an architect to treat an availability zone (AZ) as a failure domain; this approach is equivalent to on-premises designs that build in resources for an entire data center to fail. As with on-premises architecture, these constraints are embedded in multiple layers of the public cloud. Some AWS services are scoped to a single AZ, so the service is subject to any failures there. Efficient IT architecture adapts to the constraints of public cloud platforms and services, just as it does for on-premises operations, so research what the cloud provider does, and does not, offer for specific setups.
In general, the more high-level the public cloud service is, the less infrastructure there is to design. For example, if it’s a serverless application, such as Azure Functions AWS Lambda, then there will be minimal infrastructure to design. But if an application uses VMs on IaaS, then the IT architect must design networks, storage and computing. Even if the application mostly uses high-level services, an architect must design architecture for any low-level services. Most applications combine high-level and lower-level services to meet business requirements.
