How to Become a Cloud Architect

Talk delivered at a private event in October 2023. Covers the role of a cloud architect, four practices (scalable infrastructure, trade-off decision making, API-driven operations, and application design patterns), and learning paths into the role. Slides in English.

Transcript

1. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How to Become a Cloud Architect Shota Yamazaki Manager, Sr. Solutions Architect Amazon Web Services Japan 1
2. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Speaker Shota Yamazaki Manager, Sr. Solutions Architect Internet Media Solutions Amazon Web Services Japan G.K. Role • Lead SA team for large Internet conglomerate customers • Support customer’s cloud adaption as Cloud Architect in a wide range of industries such as media, commerce and FinTech • Specialty in distributed systems and big data analytics
3. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. My career 3 Student Technology Consultant Software Engineer Solutions Architect SA Manager Oracle AWS Startup company (founded by my friend) University Middleware Cloud
4. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Agenda 1. What is a Cloud Architect? 2. Practices as a Cloud Architect 3. What is the next step? 4
5. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What is a Cloud Architect? 5
6. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. General role definition of Cloud Architect 1. Define company's cloud computing strategy including cloud adoption plans, cloud application design, and cloud operation 2. Oversee application architecture and deployment in cloud environments including public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud 3. Act as consultants to the organization with the latest trends but also expected to maintain hands-on skills as well 6 Example of Cloud Architect definition https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloud-architect
7. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Necessary skills 7 Application architecture Orchestration OS Virtualization Security Networking Database Big data Distributed systems Finance Programming Program leadership Collaboration Communication Thought leadership Hard skills Problem solving Machine leraning Soft skills Decision making Example of Cloud Architect definition https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloud-architect
8. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Learning path of my career 8 Student Technology Consultant Software Engineer Solutions Architect SA Manager Oracle AWS Startup company (founded by my friend) University Communication / Collaboration / Problem solving / Decision making / Program leadership Thought leadership Finance Orchestration Big data Networking (Cisco cert) OS / Virtualization (LPIC cert) Programming (C, Python) Machine learning Application architecture Distributed systems Database (Oracle cert) Security Programming (Java) Application architecture Programming (Ruby) Middleware Cloud
9. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Practices as a Cloud Architect 9
10. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 10 Cloud computing broadened the scope which one engineer can control
11. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Practices as a Cloud Architect 1. Empowering with scalable cloud infrastructure 2. Decision making with tradeoffs 3. No more hardware - everything API driven 4. Established application design pattern 11
12. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Typical web application 12 Database (Primary) Load Balancer Web Server CDN Object Storage Database (Replica) DNS Dynamic contents Static contents
13. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Simple architecture on AWS 13 Amazon Route 53 Amazon CloudFront Amazon Aurora (Reader) Elastic Load Balancing EC2 Instance (Web Server) Dynamic contents Static contents Amazon S3 Amazon Aurora (Writer) EC2 Instance (Web Server) EC2 Instance (Web Server) Where do these services work physically?
14. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Scalable infrastructure at data center level 14 Amazon Route 53 Amazon CloudFront Amazon Aurora (Reader) Elastic Load Balancing EC2 Instance (Web Server) Amazon S3 Amazon Aurora (Writer) EC2 Instance (Web Server) EC2 Instance (Web Server) Edge locations (550+ PoPs) As of Oct 17. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
15. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Scalable infrastructure at data center level 15 Amazon Route 53 Amazon CloudFront Amazon Aurora (Writer) Amazon Aurora (Reader) EC2 Instance (Web Server) EC2 Instance (Web Server) Amazon S3 Edge locations (550+ PoPs) Region (32 launched Regions) Elastic Load Balancing EC2 Instance (Web Server) As of Oct 17. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
16. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Scalable infrastructure at data center level 16 Amazon Route 53 Amazon CloudFront Amazon Aurora (Writer) Amazon Aurora (Reader) EC2 Instance (Web Server) EC2 Instance (Web Server) Amazon S3 Edge locations (550+ PoPs) Region (32 launched Regions) AZ-1 AZ-2 AZ-3 Elastic Load Balancing EC2 Instance (Web Server) (3+ AZs in a single Region) As of Oct 17. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
17. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Scalable infrastructure at data center level 17 Amazon Route 53 Amazon CloudFront Amazon Aurora (Writer) Amazon Aurora (Reader) EC2 Instance (Web Server) EC2 Instance (Web Server) Amazon S3 Edge locations (550+ PoPs) Region (32 launched Regions) AZ-1 AZ-2 AZ-3 Elastic Load Balancing DNS loadbalancing Sync replication EC2 Instance (Web Server) (3+ AZs in a single Region) As of Oct 17. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
18. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Scalable infrastructure at data center level 18 Amazon Route 53 Amazon CloudFront Amazon Aurora (Writer) Amazon Aurora (Reader) EC2 Instance (Web Server) EC2 Instance (Web Server) Amazon S3 Edge locations (550+ PoPs) Region (32 launched Regions) AZ-1 AZ-2 AZ-3 Elastic Load Balancing DNS loadbalancing Sync replication 3 AZ duplication EC2 Instance (Web Server) (3+ AZs in a single Region) As of Oct 17. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
19. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How about hybrid cloud? 19 Public Cloud Corporate data center Database
20. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Architecting to use scalable cloud infrastructure 20 Public Cloud Corporate data center dedicated line Load Balancer Web Server CDN Object Storage Database (Replica) Database API Gateway API Server HTTPS Replication
21. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What we learned • Broaden your imagination to scalable cloud infrastructure • Understand physical topology and predict bottleneck • Imagine all network communications 21 Understand general IT technology to see entire system. If you could imagine all, you can design it.
22. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Practices as a Cloud Architect 1. Empowering with scalable cloud infrastructure 2. Decision making with tradeoffs 3. No more hardware - everything API driven 4. Established application design pattern 22
23. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Even if you were super Cloud Architect… 23 Cloud Architect Business stakeholders Never stop the system. High availability is super important. Anyway, reduce system cost. Low cost is most important. Trust from users is most important. Security is our top priority. User experience is our key. Don't compromise on performance.
24. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Decision making with tradeoffs • Availability against Cost • RPO/RTO against Cost • Performance against Cost • CAP Theorem • Customizing or Standardization … 24 Usual top priorities Typical tradeoffs 1. Security is a top priority 2. Pay cost for value
25. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Tradeoffs for availability Single AZ Multi AZ Multi Region Multi Cloud Durability against failure Host failure AZ failure Wide area failure within a single region* Cost $ $$ $$$ $$$$ Operational difficulty ★ ★ ★★★ ★★★★★★ * More extensive failures are applicable since distance between AZs is less than 100 km Region 1 Region 2 Other Service AZ1 AZ2 AZ1 AZ2 Region 1 Region 2 Other Service AZ1 AZ2 AZ1 AZ2 Region 1 Region 2 Other Service AZ1 AZ2 AZ1 AZ2 Region 1 Region 2 Other Service AZ1 AZ2 AZ1 AZ2 25
26. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Using managed services or building yourself AWS Lambda Serverless functions AWS Fargate Serverless containers Amazon ECS / Amazon EKS Container management as a service Amazon EC2 Infrastructure as a service More operational cost Less operational cost Managed / Proprietary Generic / Controllable
27. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What we learned • Cloud Architect has control over system topology and cost • Understand tradeoffs and define objective • Communicate with business stakeholders 27
28. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Practices as a Cloud Architect 1. Empowering with scalable cloud infrastructure 2. Decision making with tradeoffs 3. No more hardware - everything API driven 4. Established application design pattern 28
29. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What cloud computing enables you to do 29 Scalable cloud infrastracture Software
30. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Use technology as a service through API Define and publish service specifications • API documentation • Service limits • Service status 30 Cloud Service Provider (even private cloud) Cloud Architect Design how to use services • Understand service interface • Increase service limit (if necessary) • Monitor with service metrics
31. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Automate everything with API Infrastructure provisioning Application release Service operation
32. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What we learned • Be aware of service limit • Monitor with service metrics • Automate everything 32 Everything API driven
33. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Practices as a Cloud Architect 1. Empowering with scalable cloud infrastructure 2. Decision making with tradeoffs 3. No more hardware - everything API driven 4. Established application design pattern 33
34. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS Prescriptive Guidance - Cloud design patterns 34 Guidance for implementing commonly used modernization design patterns Transactional outbox Strangler fig https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/cloud-design-patterns/introduction.html …
35. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Architecture Dojo! (in Japanese) 35 Special architecting session by AWS Solutions Architect in AWS Summit Tokyo 2022 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7trZIt5H3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9YqEELWutA 1. Online sales 2. SaaS metering 1. Online gaming 2. Modernization
36. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What we learned Cloud architecture is not just selecting services, overall application design is more important 36 Understanding higher-level patterns and application design will help you
37. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. What is the next step? 37
38. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS Certifications – will be good learning path 38
39. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 70:20:10 model for learning and development 39 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/70/20/10_Model_(Learning_and_Development)
40. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Career examples from our teammates 40 Software Developer Internet service company Tech Lead or CTO Internet service company Solutions Architect AWS System Engineer System Integrator Solutions Architect AWS Project Manager IT Service Vender New graduate Student University AWS Solutions Architect AWS Tech U
41. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS Tech U - Capstone Project 41 Practice developing a real product through working backwards PR/FAQ Design Development Presentation (CM & demo)
42. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS Tech U - Capstone Project 42 PR/FAQ Design Development Presentation (CM & demo) Practice developing a real product through working backwards Gathering information for internal trainings and workshops Information search periodic execution Save data and approval flags Notification Update approval flags Update categolies Data transformation Auth Front-end Listing trainings Filtering by category and time Free search
43. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS Tech U - Capstone Project 43 PR/FAQ Design Development Presentation (CM & demo) Practice developing a real product through working backwards
44. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Takeaways 1. Cloud Architect is the role not only for public cloud, but also for private cloud and hybrid cloud. 2. Understand general IT technology to see entire system. If you could imagine all, you can design it. 3. Technical requirements come from business, usually with tradeoffs. Communication is an important skill. 4. Seeing is believing. Try cloud technology by your own hands, before selecting technology. 44
45. HOW TO BECOME A CLOUD ARCHITECT © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Thank you! © 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Shota Yamazaki shota-yamazaki