How to Become an Azure Architect
Azure Architect is one of the most in-demand jobs in IT. Cloud Architects salaries are expected to grow 88% this year. The average salary of a Cloud Architect is US $155,000 per year.
A Cloud Architect is responsible for understanding a customer's needs, finalizing requirements, leading a team of developers, testers, database, and other personnel to build a complete solution, finalizing and allocating cloud resources, and testing and deploying solutions on the cloud. A Cloud Architect sits with the end customers, internal decision makers, project owners, and project managers to understand the requirements and define clear detailed functional requirements for the technical teams. A Cloud Architect also works with customers to test the application, get their feedback, fix problems, and work with the deployment engineers to get projects up and running.
Watch this video to learn more about an architect.
What is an Azure Architect?
Microsoft Azure is the fastest growing cloud service provider. In total revenue, Azure is just behind AWS but growing at a faster pace than others.
An Azure Architect or Azure Solutions Architect is a Cloud Architect that builds solutions for Microsoft Azure Cloud.
A typical Azure Architect is a senior technical person with at least 10 years of experience building and managing software solutions. An Architect understands every phase of a software project life cycle, team roles, and management, and detailed technical implementation. The architect also understands virtualization, networking, storage, processing, identity, security, backup and recovery, data management, budget and planning, and governance. A typical Azure Architect is also proficient in Azure administration, testing, development, and DevOps.
How to become an Azure Architect
If you’re an experienced software architect who also has good knowledge of Microsoft Azure and has already built, deployed, and managed Azure applications and services, you may want to get certified to become an Azure Architect.
Microsoft offers two exams to become a Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert. Microsoft Azure Solutions Architects must have expertise in compute, network, storage, and security so that they can design solutions that run on Azure.
The exams are Exam AZ-300: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies and Exam AZ-301: Microsoft Azure Architect Design. Each of these exams costs US $165.
Exam AZ-300: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies
Candidates for this exam are Azure Solution Architects who advise stakeholders and translate business requirements into secure, scalable, and reliable solutions. Candidates should have advanced experience and knowledge across various aspects of IT operations, including networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data management, budgeting, and governance. This role requires managing how decisions in each area affect an overall solution. Candidates must be proficient in Azure administration, Azure development, and DevOps, and have expert-level skills in at least one of those domains.
Exam AZ-301: Microsoft Azure Architect Design
Candidates for this exam are Azure Solution Architects who advise stakeholders and translate business requirements into secure, scalable, and reliable solutions. Candidates should have advanced experience and knowledge across various aspects of IT operations, including networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data management, budgeting, and governance. This role requires managing how decisions in each area affect an overall solution. Candidates must be proficient in Azure administration, Azure development, and DevOps, and have expert-level skills in at least one of those domains.
Azure Solutions Architect
Microsoft offers both free and paid training to become an Azure Solutions Architect. The following is the path for Azure Solutions Architect.
As you can see from the above learning path, an Azure Architect is expected to have the following experience:
- Azure fundamentals
- Manage resources in Azure
- Understanding of Azure Architecture and Design
- Data storage, insight, and Azure Databricks
- Perform data engineering
The skills measured in this certification include the following:
- Deploy and configure infrastructure
- Implement workloads and security
- Create and deploy apps
- Implement authentication and secure data
- Develop for the cloud and for Azure storage
- Determine workload requirements
- Design for identity and security
- Design a data platform solution
- Design a business continuity strategy
- Design for deployment, migration, and integration
- Design an infrastructure strategy
- Design an infrastructure strategy
Designing a Storage Strategy includes designing a storage provisioning strategy, designing storage access strategy, identifying storage requirements, recommending a storage solution and storage management tools.
Designing a Compute Strategy includes designing compute provisioning and secure compute strategies, determining appropriate compute technologies (e.g., virtual machines, functions, service fabric, container instances, etc.), designing an Azure HPC environment, identifying compute requirements, and recommending management tools for compute.
Designing a Networking Strategy includes designing network provisioning and network security strategies, determining appropriate network connectivity technologies, identifying networking requirements, and recommending network management tools.
Designing a Monitoring Strategy for Infrastructure includes designing for alert notifications and designing an alert and metrics strategy.
Learn Azure
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