My journey from a Cloud consultant to a Cloud architect.
My own journey started at TietoEVRY (or EVRY as it was back then) in 2014 as a consultant. Public Cloud, while the topic back then as well, was still a bit of unexplored territory. As customers grew their interests in the Public Cloud, so did mine.
Thankfully TietoEVRY is full of opportunities and encourages you as an employee to evolve and change from your original role. The journey has now brought me into the role of a Principal Cloud Architect, working closely with my 24 000 colleagues.
Being a part of a 24 000 strong team globally gives you a lot of opportunities. And as we are a global organization, a lot of different and interesting perspectives. In our Public Cloud section, we are working in a squad model, meaning there is no “boss” in the regular sense. This culture of equalism, collaboration and initiative gives everyone their chance to contribute, regardless of her or his background. Working in squads gives us all an equal opportunity to take initiative and lead, be it on customer cases or new exciting services we offer our customers.
The technologies have enabled a lot of these new ways of working. Working with our big cloud vendors (Azure, AWS, GCP), with their big areas of services gives us a lot of opportunities to choose different solutions to different challenges. As an architect, some days revolve around drawing solutions on a whiteboard with the customers.
The next day you’re building the Minimal Viable Product (MvP) with infrastructure as code and sending it thru the famous pipeline in Azure DevOps/Git Actions. As there are lots of different technologies and tasks to have under control, you cannot do it all alone. In TietoEVRY we handle that by having several “squads” and micro teams with different specialities, such as automation gurus, data engineer’s etcetera. In the end, this helps build the best possible solution for our customers.
As the technology has matured a lot of it becomes more about explaining “how to cloud” instead of “why to cloud”. That’s why presuming to know the next step in the Cloud Journey is close to impossible.
However, an educated guess is that we will have a major focus on Machine Learning and AI going forward, this is due to a lot of data and services being moved to the cloud. We are then able to put all great Machine learning/AI services to use in their proper and most efficient way, giving our customer even more of a digital edge. As the data in the company belongs to everyone, we will work even more in different department at our customers, to enable them to become the digital champion of tomorrow. Or when we for instance make production lines more efficient at manufacturing plants, our customer is involved in choosing the right product in their shop.
The Public cloud change rate is high and still accelerating. We are committed to the journey, having a lot of great and knowledgeable people, educating ourselves and taking the initiative to change our services and offerings all the time, helping our customers become true digital champions. This commitment makes each day as a Cloud Architect at TietoEVRY a new and exciting one.
We’re looking for cloud advisors & architects to join our team helping our customers with the transformation. Apply now!
Jimmy excitedly leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the business cloud journeys. Finding out what the real challenge is and using the correct solution for it, be it a stone or a new exciting Cloud feature (hopefully the later).
Jimmy has been working actively with the Cloud journey since 2016 and is always up for a good discussion on challenging the view of “it has always been like that”.