The technology realm has always been fast-moving, and in order to keep growing in their careers, IT professionals need to incrementally acquire new skills over time. However, in the last decade, this trend of fast change has become dominant with cloud computing, becoming the 'new normal.' Now, almost every day, there are some new announcements, features, and service updates from cloud providers, which necessitates a focus on a culture of continuous learning for everyone involved. Along with this, now the typical boundaries between the usual roles of a developer, database administrator, security professional, build/release engineer, and so on have started to blur, and this has also resulted in new roles being created that focus on big-picture and end-to-end ownership. One such role is that of a 'Solutions Architect,' which started to evolve from existing roles in industry like 'Application Architect' and 'IT Architect' and has now become mainstream. There are also variations of this role. However, the most common variant is that of 'Cloud Solutions Architect,' which is a pretty dynamic role in itself.
Oftentimes, IT professionals want to switch roles, but they lack direction on how to be successful on that path. This book focuses on this very aspect around an effective transition from an existing IT role to that of a Solutions Architect and explains in a very logical manner the steps to embark on that journey. It starts off with a simple, very relatable explanation of what this role entails and how it differs from a few of the other similar types of profiles. Post that, it goes into the technical skills and aspects of knowledge that are needed to be a successful Solutions Architect. This begins with basic design pillars and architectural principles (including high availability, reliability, performance, security, and cost optimizations), followed by a deep dive into each one of those. The book also covers some key concepts around cloud-native architectures, DevOps, and the data engineering and machine learning domains, which are the cornerstone of any modern-day architecture.
I have personally been through this journey of being a Solutions Architect from a development team lead, and so has Saurabh, and we always wished for a handbook that could have helped us back then. So, to fill that major gap in the industry, Saurabh has created this very detailed book, which is based on personal experiences and learnings that makes it a very relatable read for anyone from a variety of backgrounds. I highly recommend you read this book and keep it as a handy reference always, as in it you will find very important nuggets of knowledge that will help you be a successful Solutions Architect, and open up a new world of infinite possibilities!
Kamal Arora
Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture, AWS
https://www.amazon.com/Kamal-Arora/e/B07HLTSNRJ/
AWS Solution Architect Leader and author of two Packt books, Cloud-Native Architectures and Architecting Cloud-Native Applications