As a start to this blog post, I think it is important to understand how I see my role as a CSA (Cloud Solution Architect) with my customer. I am primarily a trusted advisor and my customers respect what I have to say, I question and challenge my customers in a constructive way to approach the challenge or problem statement in a different way. I have an amazing role of using Azure as my LEGO playpen and then building a custom solution (LEGO model) to help my customers.
So, of late I have been having a lot of networking discussions with my customers. Now these discussions have been ranging from a new customer to a very advanced customer that has been using Azure for quite some time. These have also ranged from new connection options to extend their on-premises connectivity into Azure, which we call “Hybrid Connectivity”, as well as networking considerations once in the cloud with Azure Native connectivity such AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) and ACI (Azure Container Instances) to simply name the current most top of mind topics.
So, having these discussions is not an uncommon practice and these are the types of discussions that should be happening, there is nothing wrong with this. All that is happening more and more often is that these discussions are happening in isolation as opposed to the customer working on having a holistic approach to this discussion and working on a full cloud networking solution.
You cannot necessarily think of networking in silos anymore. Yes, networking can be silo’ed and many people do this. However with the “new world” of cloud and the networking associated to this concept, networking is now a critical point on your cloud journey. There are multiple options available here as a start. THe main role of a Cloud SOlutions Architect or more importantly a trusted advisor, is to understand the requirements of your customer and work with the required teams, usually networking, InfoSec, business owner and Application owner to determine the correct networking option for the cusotmer. This would be a mix of solutions and architectures.
This is a great start to understanding which technologies can or could be used to serve a particular need and then this can be built up to a solution that is extendable and usable by your customer.