Hi Andrew,
Great blog!
Until we get to the architect section I completely agree with you.
By the way, great service to the cloud community with this blog.
I have been an architect for 25 years know so let me describe my 25 years experience and the countless individuals I have helped get architect roles over the years
A real solution architect role is extremely different than a cloud engineer.
A true solution architect is a customer facing role. The architect asks the customer their business goals, business challenges, legal and regulatory environments.
Then the solution architect will design the end-to-end solution all across a single platform. I.e AWS
The the solution architect needs to be able to present that solution to the customer, and show the customer the value of the solution is greater than the cost to the organization (ROI modeling),
A tue solution architect will not configure the cloud, program or do anything hands on other them design.
A cloud architect is similar to a solution architect in that they start with the customer and get the same requirements.
The difference is that the cloud architect will be able to help the organizations with hybrid and multi cloud environments.
So for example as a cloud architect I may consult with a client. After review of a clients systems we may find that the best architecture is an open stack cloud at the customers datacenter, with some infrastructure services on the AWS cloud, and some ML/AI on the GCP cloud.
So as cloud architects we are vendor neutral and pick cloud services from various vendors to assist an organizations needs.
The engineer vs architect issue is very important.
Train to be an engineer and someone won't be able to work as a cloud/solutions architect.By comparison a cloud architect will not have the skills to be a cloud engineer. As these careers are so differet.
This confusion causes so many problems for people as they dont know where to begin their career.
Architects will not code, configure, do sysops, or devops. These are great careers but not architecture.
We actually made a video on this topic. Cloud Architect Vs Solutions Architect
I hope you think its okay for me to post that link here.
I know you do a lot to help the cloud computing community.
I appreciate everything you do.
Best regards,
Mike Gibbs MS, MBA, CCIE, GCP-PCA, AWS-CSA CEO - Go Cloud Architects