AWS Solutions Architect

File:AWS Solutions Architect Ramp-Up Guide.pdf

As the top certification in 2023, I'm getting my AWS Solutions Architect - Professional certification.

Neil Davis from Digital Cloud Training on top interview questions for Solutions Architect roles
Medium blog post

Amazon has a pretty robust, multi-lingual ecosystem of paid products and services for training, tutorials, and certification. It is somewhat challenging just to get an account created (well, actually you need multiple accounts: one for AWS login and product usage, and separate account for their "Builder" (paid) training system. In any case, I enrolled in the Solutions Architect - Knowledge Badge Readiness Path

Key Personal Characteristics

Are you a Solutions Architect, or want to become one? You will need:

1. Hands-on experience - a Solutions Architect is not an entry-level position. It takes years of experience in the technology sector before you have seen and learned enough lessons to truly become a valuable architect.
2. Business analysis skills for understanding and interpreting the customer requirements.
3. Strong interpersonal skills for dealing regularly with various stakeholders - architects don't work in ivory towers.
4. Broad technology skills - software, hardware, various vendors and so-on
5. On-premises technology
6. Other clouds: you can't know just one. You should know AWS, Azure, GCP and perhaps even more cloud operators such as Digital Ocean, Linode, RackSpace or service offerings from giants like IBM/RedHat, Canonical etc.
7. Core technology skills - Compute, storage, networking, databases
8. Automation, containers and serverless technologies
9. Programming or scripting useful

Global

Regions, with discreet Availability Zones for geographic proximity (low latency), and data compliance. Pay attention to costs (which are determined on a local basis) and service availability.

Edge locations are what they call CDNs. CloudFront is their product.

Interacting

• Management Console The web browser interface to AWS
• CLI (including cloudshell which is what they call the browser-based CLI)
• SDKs You can use your favorite programming language to interact with the AWS Service APIs

Free Software alternatives

Any Solutions Architect with credibility is going to acknowledge that the giants of proprietary software solutions have built their empires on the backs of Free Software. But the product offerings have grown like weeds in a garden, so it can be hard to distinguish the original crop. What solutions or equivalents exist?

Cloud Provider Alternatives

For specific needs, there are sometimes niche vendors that offer a more attractive proposition. https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/aws-alternatives/ lists alternatives such as Digital Ocean, Kamatera, LiquidWeb and Cloudways if all you really need is

Links

AWS is so large, here's a short list of the most relevant links

1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/