It should come as no surprise that companies are considering hiring cloud architects. And the bigger the enterprise, the greater the demand. The market growth for cloud services is increasing year by year. Gartner is looking at continued growth in the cloud sector.
And then we have the two major players in the market, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Azure's market share is increasing year by year. The demand for Azure Architects is also increasing year by year.
Yes, AWS dominates the market, but Azure is now emerging as the new cloud market in the past three years. More and more projects are being run on Azure.
So where does a cloud architect come into play?
The biggest gap in the industry when it comes to the cloud is skills. The lack of knowledge and skills on cloud platforms widens the gap between supply and demand.
Knowing about Azure Administration is not enough. You also need to be an expert in designing and implementing solutions on Azure. Organizations looking for someone who is great at:
- Fulfilling their customer requirements. Applications deployed the right way with minimal disruptions.
- Reducing Cost. Cost is an important factor for any organization. You can reduce costs by using the correct deployment patterns. Instead of investing in new hardware, cloud-hosting can reduce capital investments.
- Keep up with technologies. Cloud platforms keep on rolling out newer features. A company is more likely to adopt newer technologies when employing cloud-based services.
And that’s where training and certification is so important
Companies are looking for trained and certified Azure Architects
Being an Azure Architect means having a thorough understanding of a variety of aspects such as:
- Monitoring your Azure infrastructure. Knowing how to configure key metrics and logs for resources deployed on the Azure platform.
- Knowing how to work with various aspects of Azure storage accounts.
- Configuring High Availability for your virtual machines.
- Building resources using Azure Resource Manager templates.
- Implementing network architectures.
- Understanding of how to design for identity and security in Azure Active Directory.
- Knowing how to architect environments that need connectivity to on-premises environments.
- Network storage and security for your workloads on Azure.
- Implementing backups for your infrastructure hosted on Azure.
- Implementing solutions using Azure Web Apps, Azure Functions, and Azure Logic Apps.
- Deploying container-based environments with Azure Kubernetes.
- Deploying data stores such as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL database.
- Knowing how to design a business continuity strategy for your company.
- Understanding the best practices to design for deployment migration of your workloads to Azure.
What’s the path to becoming an Azure Architect?
The official Microsoft learning path for Azure Solutions Architect is as follows:
You will need to pass two certification exams
AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies.The exam focused on how to use the technologies on Azure. Before giving this exam, you need to understand how to prepare the application. It also checks your ability to deploy applications using Azure services. Key services it tests include Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Storage Accounts.
AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design.This exam focuses on designing applications and infrastructure. You first need to get a good understanding of the services. Then start designing your application architecture using those services.
Once you have passed the Fundamentals exam, you can move on. Consider the Azure Administrator Associate certification.
