Cloud Computing

The positions responsible for the design and implementation of information technology infrastructure in a public cloud environment can span multiple roles including, Systems Administrators/Engineers, Database Administrators, Network Administrators/Engineers, Storage Administrators/Engineers, Systems/Network/Solutions/Enterprise Architects, programmers/developers, and similar technology-driven roles which shoulder the business and functional responsibilities for architecting infrastructure design. Due to the ever-expanding features and capabilities of public cloud providers, this list of associated infrastructure specialists is also expanding.

Infrastructure Architects are responsible for the overall design and direction for system and application deployments. These architects have traditionally created designs that have spanned multiple office locations as well as corporate and collocated data centres. With the growing prevalence of public cloud deployments, they have added IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) opportunities to their list of deployment tools. This allows these technology specialists to work towards migration solutions, offsite storage solutions, dynamic resource elasticity, and other design paradigms to create solutions that best fit the needs of each organization.

Systems Administrators/Engineers are able to utilize public cloud providers in order to automate, expand, streamline, simplify, and accelerate their deployment models. Utilizing their experience in automation, these technologists can programmatically deploy infrastructure using the command line, language-specific SDK integrations, and infrastructure templating capabilities. This group is able to manage their technology footprint through the use of managed services to offload the administration of tasks such as managing a centralized activity logging by defining permissions and recording events. The ability to define a solution and then replicate that design to multiple environments and locations can be a significant responsibility of the position along with managing the integration of cloud computing offerings into existing technology solution sets.

Database Administrators are increasingly engaging with public cloud providers as it gives them greater control over the details of their deployments. They are able to utilize resources on demand rather than waiting for resources from other departments. Additionally, they can use the advanced features of cloud providers such as managed database services for caching, relational databases, and NoSQL data solutions.

Storage Administrators gain the flexibility to scale their storage needs without concern for hardware availability or capital expense. Using multiple storage offerings from cloud vendors, storage-related technology specialists can build solutions that best fit their storage needs using the tools provided by their vendor, or solutions from the vendor’s 3rd party partners to deliver scalable, highly available primary and disaster recovery storage solutions. Implementing backups, deploying shared and clustered storage solutions, system snapshots, and data migrations are just a few examples of activities that can be automated via multiple programming languages using public cloud vendors and 3rd party partner solutions.

Storage Administrators gain the flexibility to scale their storage needs without concern for hardware availability or capital expense. Using multiple storage offerings from cloud vendors, storage-related technology specialists can build solutions that best fit their storage needs using the tools provided by their vendor, or solutions from the vendor’s 3rd party partners to deliver scalable, highly available primary and disaster recovery storage solutions. Implementing backups, deploying shared and clustered storage solutions, system snapshots, and data migrations are just a few examples of activities that can be automated via multiple programming languages using public cloud vendors and 3rd party partner solutions.