Note: This book has evolved into The Software Architect Elevator, which contains 5 new chapters and many edits. It's available from Amazon and the O'Reilly Learning Platform.

The Changing Role of IT

Many large enterprises are feeling pressure from the rapid digitalization of the world: digital disruptors attack unexpectedly with brand-new business models; the "FaceBook generation" has dramatically different user expectations; and a whole slew of new technologies has become available to everyone with a credit card. This is tough stuff for enterprises that have been, and still are, very successful, but are built around traditional technology and organizational structures. "Turning the tanker", as the need to transform is often described, has become a board room-level topic in many traditional enterprises. Not as easily done as said.

The Changing Role of Architects

Chief IT Architects and CTOs play a key role in such a digital transformation endeavor. They combine the technical, communication, and organizational skill to understand how a tech stack refresh can actually benefit the business, what "being agile" and "DevOps" really mean, and what technology infrastructure is needed to assure quality while moving faster. Their job is not an easy one, though: they must maneuver in an organization where IT is often still seen as a cost center, where operations means "run" as opposed to "change", and where middle-aged middle-management has become cozy neither understanding the business strategy nor the underlying technology. It's no surprise then that IT architects have become some of the most sought-after IT professionals around the globe.

What You Will Learn

This book supports IT architects with the skills necessary to become effective not just in systems architecture, but also in shaping and driving the necessary transformation of large-scale IT departments. In today’s world, technical and organizational transformation have become inseparable. Organized into 37 episodes, this book explains:

• The role and qualities of an architect in a large enterprise
• Architecture at enterprise scale
• Communicating to a variety of stakeholders
• Understanding organizational structures and systems
• Transforming traditional organizations

Every enterprise finds itself in some stage of a cloud migration these days, or cloud transformation, as it's often called. Cloud computing is an amazing resource that can provide fully managed platforms, auto-optimizing and even auto-healing operations, per-second billing, pre-trained machine learning models, and globally distributed transactional data stores. So, it's no wonder that most enterprises want to take advantage of such capabilities. 

Still, migrating a whole enterprise to the cloud isn't as easy as pushing a button. Migration itself can be a costly endeavor while lifting and shifting legacy applications to the cloud is unlikely to bring the anticipated benefits. At the same time, though, re-architecting applications to run optimally in the cloud is likely to be cost prohibitive and not always a worthwhile investment. So, enterprises need to have a better and more nuanced strategy than just "we're moving to the cloud."

A sound cloud strategy isn't something you can find in a recipe book or copy from another organization. Each organization has a different starting point and has to work under different constraints, both internal and external. In addition, a cloud strategy isn't just a technical strategy. It requires not only a solid understanding of cloud architecture trade-offs but also close alignment between business and IT goals, good decision discipline, and last but not least good communication skills. 

Not quite coincidentally, those are same capabilities that make an architect successful in the enterprise. They are also at the heart of my earlier book 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation. While 37 Things considered the role of the architect in a broader IT landscape (and an inevitable transformation agenda), this book applies "elevator architect" thinking to cloud architecture and cloud migrations specifically.

Contents

30 Chapters accompany an organization on its journey to the cloud, focusing on options, decisions, and trade-offs - the core elements of any strategy:

• Part 1: Understanding the Cloud - Cloud is very different from traditional IT procurement, so you'll have to rethink the way your IT works.
• Part 2: Organizing for the Cloud - Cloud impacts more than your tech landscape.
• Part 3: Moving to the Cloud - There are many ways to the cloud; please choose wisely.
• Part 4: Architecting the Cloud - Look beyond products and buzzword and instead use rational decision models.
• Part 5: Building for the Cloud - The cloud is a formidable platform, but applications running on top of it need to do their part, also.
• Part 6: Embracing Cloud - To reap the full benefits of cloud, you need to go all in.