Solutions Architect : What’s its role and requirement skills ?

What are the roles of the Solutions Architect ?

The Solutions Architect aims at understanding, designing and integrating the implementation of reliable solutions to the firm technical problematics. In the scope of a fast-growing evolution of Systems Information (SI) in the business structure, the Solutions Architect will be in charge of creating a safe and feasible solution plan. Their missions can be divided into three general axes, that are:

1. The analysis of problems’ context arising from projects

The SA has to build an exhaustive environment analysis of the project under study. This will allow the SA to define the scope of the project, to frame the different problems and to state the global solutions that he will have to develop later on.

2. Design the solution plan

After the project environment analysis, the SA will have to design a solution plan that will meet the clients’ expectations as well as anticipate the different steps to reach its goal. The Solutions Architect must conceive an exploitation strategy for the offered solutions as well as a chronological and technological forecast adapted to the client business field.

3. Adapt to the constraints linked to the project

The constraints that the SA must take into consideration can arise from several fields, such as: managing, technical or business.  As for the managing constraints, the SA is in charge of the communication with different teams about the members’ mobilization, required to constitute his team, as well as the possible collaborators needed to meet the project goals. From a technical point of view, they will often have to face execution constraints, adaptation to the development environment or even the need to access a specific technological tool. Finally, on the business side, they will have to be able to optimize the granted budget by taking into account the mentioned deadlines and constraints.

What are the skills of the Solutions Architect ?

1. Understanding customer needs

The consideration and awareness of the needs are probably one of the most important tasks of the preparatory phase for the project. The SA must understand the needs on a field level, trades and internal processes of the customers: the SA has to acquire a general vision of the technological specs of the customer business.

2. Knowledge and interest for new technologies

Logically, the Solutions Architect position will better suit profiles with a particular palatability and in-depth knowledge of new technologies. This will allow them to develop an appropriate and efficient software solution. They must keep themselves informed with the updates on the operating systems and on the corresponding technologies for database management.

3. Communication and organization

Apart from their technical skills essential to good project management, the SA should be able to explain in an easy and clear way the implemented solutions to their customer business problems. They will also have a consequent organizational workload essentially managing the speakers involved. Even though the speaking profiles will vary, they should be able to generate team dynamics to effectively achieve their objectives.

Solutions Architect, an emerging profession

Despite being new, the solution architect position attracts more and more companies that have a responsibility for creating or maintaining information systems. Every organization that needs to align its business objectives with the company IT needs such as services, products, softwares or architecture.

The AWS Solutions Architect – Associate Certificate

 Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a course to learn the skills necessary to the position of a SA, suitable for the solutions development on structures, services and Amazon cloud. Amazon also offers the possibility to obtain the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification which will validate and guarantee the skills acquired during the training process. For more information on the Solutions Architect AWS training at Liora, feel free to visit the following link:  If you are not familiar with the Amazon infrastructures, no worries!  The training phase will also introduce you to all the necessary basic knowledge to the understanding of Amazon system and services and will prepare you for the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification.