What Is Really Missing In Emerging Cloud Architects And Why
The problems had always existed, but this time it costs money!
As a geek my quest for knowledge has been insatiable, hence I have always wanted to learn new things and ‘try’ things on to attain practical knowledge. Gratifyingly this attitude has helped me stay sharp and stand out in my field.
A few things I noticed around me pushed me to pen this article.
When I started creating learning content last year, I decided not to take the easy and lucrative path of catering to the market demand for certification courses, but instead on developing and passing on practical, usable “knowledge” required in the field. I knew from the beginning that the uptake for such content would be less.
Recently I was reflecting on the performance of one course I had created on a popular online training platform on Azure Cost Optimization. As expected, the uptake was low, and it doesn’t bother me as well. [This article is not about me cribbing about it :)].
Below, I explore through his example what is wrong with today’s tech enthusiasts.
Cost optimization is an extremely important exercise and design aspect. It can decide the viability and sustainability of cloud environments eventually.
All the frequent blogs and LinkedIn posts from Microsoft and other Cloud evangelists re-validates its importance.
Yet, in the real world Cost Optimization is non-existent or at best an afterthought. Only when the bills start ballooning and breach budgets, people take notice!
Looking back at all the cloud projects I had worked on earlier, Cloud architecture was optimized for cost during design and implementation in exactly ZERO projects, as in not even the basics!
For many architects, optimizing cloud architecture for cost simply meant selecting the right T-shirt size for VMs or services!!
The most I have seen was during the pre-sales stage when a consultant was present, the consultant would consider costs for Reservations when the Bill of Material (BOM) was created. Unfortunately, by the time it comes to the implementation stage, it would be done by a different team, and they would forget about the reservations.
Sadly, that is the reality for many organizations today.
A few years back when I interviewed for AWS, the interviewer showed very keen interest in some of the work I had done on a cost optimization project. He pointed out how several of their customers were struggling to control costs and how Cost optimization had become a priority for them to be able to justify Cloud as a viable destination for their workload and sustainable in the future.
Another customer came to us for optimization after seeing that their full-year budget for the cloud was nearly used up in 6 months and saw it was not profitable to run their SaaS product on the cloud.
In yet another instance we were able to achieve 6-digit cost savings for a customer just by following the basics of Cost Optimization, 7 months down the line they are running double the workload they had earlier, and yet the costs remain well below the earlier invoices.
I ended up doing another round of optimization for them, again a large 6-digit sum and I had not even fully covered the things from Chapter 1 of my course.
If the Cloud Architect has the right knowledge and intent, there’s a lot of good he can do for the customers.
Since many customers lack the right expertise and rely on their service provider’s skill set, they fail to realize that these opportunities for savings are underutilized. They waste money on cloud unnecessarily, till costs remain below a certain threshold, what a waste!
Though here I am focusing on Cloud cost optimization, the same applies for CLOUD SECURITY as well.
Many of you have read about data leakage horror stories from well-known enterprises just because someone cloud architect didn’t know Security-101 like, how to disable public access for blob storage or to avoid using Public IP for every other provisioned Virtual Machine.
Why is the state of affairs like this?
As part of my research, I looked at other courses on the marketplace that were focused on practical knowledge and compared it with popular certification-based courses on the same subject.
What I observed showed why we have a shortage of good talent for not just cloud but also other emerging technologies.
This is what I found, even for those courses from the same instructor!
ANY course that was tagged to a Certification had 50x — 100x more students than those courses which were aimed at specialization or practical knowledge
The most terribly produced and hard to understand “Certification” course I knew of had more students than all the FOUR specialization courses above put together!
Surprised?
Now, these certification courses are not bad, don’t get me wrong, and these courses do what they promise i.e., they do exceedingly well in making sure that you get through the exam without getting hurt.
But beyond that they weren’t particularly useful in giving anyone usable practical knowledge, they provide mostly superficial or foundational knowledge when used standalone.
Certifications are great, no doubt; but you need to back up that knowledge with some apprenticeship or a deeper understanding of the subject. Otherwise, you may end up dealing with nightmares!
What are the reasons behind this trend?
Is it that ‘students’ are so eager to certify themselves?
I don’t think so.
While there are a few techies who take a certification to validate their existing knowledge, most people I see around are too casual to study and prepare for a certification. I remember a time when managers would chase around teams to get an MCSE or other certifications done but to no avail.
But nowadays, everyone around is multi-cloud certified or a Kubernetes expert!
So, what bucked the earlier trend?
When Cloud computing and disruptive technologies like Kubernetes caught on like wildfire, many organizations were caught off-guard.
They realized that their so-called ‘talent pool’ was no longer equipped to cater to the customers’ needs based on emerging technologies. Most traditional service providers worked old-school and still are.
What did they do?
Initially, some companies tried firing old talent and hire anew. Well, that didn’t work out so well.
Mainly because there weren’t enough ‘knowledge seekers’ out there who were up to date on these technologies. Moreover, if they continued firing employees because they are outdated, soon they will be left with none. Lol…you know 😉
So there started the saga of ‘Upskilling’, Next-Gen skills, Certification drive, etc. whatever your company calls it.
Companies started upskilling & certification drives were seen as the panacea. They started offering more bonuses or raises to employees who upgraded themselves.
Initially it was great, there were classroom sessions and there were labs. Folks actually learned something!
Soon, companies wanted to cut corners with training costs as they always do and turned to much cheaper online classes as the sole model for upskilling. While online classes are great, they lack the practical hands-on aspect of training unless someone was self-motivated and did it with the right intent.
But that was not the real problem.
What rendered it a completely useless exercise was when companies focused purely on beefing up the no. of certified associates just for bragging rights without emphasizing practical skills.
It’s obvious they forgot about the inverse relationship with Quantity vs Quality.
My own experience serves as a fitting example, I had to get several of these certifications which I gladly obliged.
It turned into a futile exercise when they came back asking to do the same certification repeatedly just because the vendor released an upgraded certification every 6 months or so.
As a motivated techie, I could use that time much more efficiently to learn other things!
Fast forward to today, we have a bunch of ‘certified’ talent who are unable to perform on the ground.
Do you see this phenomenon around you?
What is the solution to this problem?
I have been able to clear a few certifications simply because I just read too much about the topic and some common sense. Frankly, I should not have been able to pass those!!
When the time came to work on some of that tech in real life, I too struggled a lot. I was still knowledgeable on the topic but all that appeared superficial and rendered me ineffective at least for some time till I learned to do those things hands-on.
It’s nice to have Certifications, they are a great attestation of your domain knowledge, but vendors should invest more to differentiate superficial knowledge from true experience, the focus should shift from how much someone knows about a topic (by passive learning — reading, videos) to how capable is the candidate to implement a task or debug it (practical knowledge).
Some advanced level Cisco certifications are a splendid example where candidates are required to perform actual hands-on work and troubleshooting in a live environment.
This may not be required for entry-level certifications like Az-900 or Az-104 or its equivalents but definitely for higher levels of certifications. E.g., Microsoft recently updated its certifications in this direction, but there’s still a long way to go.
In the meantime, Companies should stop chasing certifications as though they are a magic wand. Instead, focus and invest in creating true skills.
More certified employees don’t necessarily mean a better talent pool!
BTW, for those interested, my courses on Udemy:
