WHAT DOES A DEVOPS ARCHITECT DO?

Published: Oct 28, 2024 – The DevOps Architect defines the DevOps architecture and cloud strategy while overseeing the CI/CD implementation roadmap. This responsibility includes managing CI/CD tools and pipelines, integrating disruptive technologies, and troubleshooting pipeline issues to enhance scalability and performance. The architect also facilitates collaboration among product teams and leads the resolution of complex technical challenges impacting operations.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for DevOps Architect

1. DevOps Architect Accountabilities

  • Cloud Infrastructure Management: Research, develop, and implement AWS infrastructure and management standards across AWS accounts.
  • Information Security: Work in coordination with OSS in Information Security to implement security best practices across the entire cloud footprint.
  • Collaboration: Work with other senior engineers across the technology team to drive forward infrastructure and service automation efforts.
  • Tool Development: Develop and implement tooling used to manage various aspects of the sprawling cloud footprint.
  • Automation: Create automated tooling for cloud platforms as well as monitoring and alerting purposes.
  • CI/CD Best Practices: Review and establish best practices for CI/CD solutions in collaboration with teams.
  • Environment Setup: Provide all environments (Staging, Dev, QA) set up, liaising with teams, ensuring they meet company standards and best practices.
  • Production Support: Support and work with other SysOps/DevOps colleagues to support Production environments and deployments.
  • Release Management: Perform release and configuration management.
  • Technical Delivery: Act as a technical delivery resource for project-specific tasks.

2. DevOps Architect Functions

  • Monitoring Services: Build and maintain the core technology platform monitoring services.
  • Automated Deployment: Build and maintain automated deployment of the platform’s cloud infrastructure.
  • Secure Deployment Pipelines: Build and maintain secure continuous deployment pipelines and automate continuous security monitoring and alerting using cloud capabilities.
  • Threat Assessment: Help with threat assessment and penetration testing as early as necessary/possible.
  • Problem Identification: Help identify problem points within the production environment.
  • Operational Problem Solving: Solve day-to-day operational problems with the production environment.
  • Infrastructure Security: Ensure robust, stable, and secure back-end infrastructure to support the product portfolio.
  • Development Support: Support the development team during application enhancements.
  • Business Continuity: Contribute to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery design.
  • Industry Awareness: Stay up to date with industry trends.

3. DevOps Architect Job Description

  • DevOps Strategy Review: Review existing client DevOps strategies and provide recommendations for improvements.
  • Requirements Gathering: Gather requirements, design, and implement new DevOps strategies for clients.
  • CI/CD Pipeline Design: Design and implement CI/CD pipelines.
  • Process Design: Design processes/schedules to deliver completed development to various environments.
  • Build Script Development: Design and write build scripts.
  • Deployment Verification: Verify successful continuous delivery deployments.
  • Version Control Maintenance: Maintain a version control repository.
  • Branch Structure Design: Take responsibility for designing the branch structure.
  • Production Deployment: Deploy releases to a client’s production environment.
  • Build Validation Review: Review continuous delivery validation builds for failures.

4. DevOps Architect Overview

  • Technology Strategy Collaboration: Collaborate with technology teams in defining the technology strategy, solutions, and architecture in data.
  • Data Model Management: Establish and maintain core data models, information standards, and data management lifecycle controls.
  • Business Analysis: Work closely with business sponsors to identify opportunities, and analyze, and interpret trends or patterns.
  • Project Ownership: Take ownership of analytical projects end to end from extracting and exploring data, generating hypotheses, building structured analysis, and evaluating results.
  • Data Platform Development: Apply industry best practices to create a scalable data platform that supports big data development, deployment, operation, and management.
  • Data Governance Execution: Establish and execute the mechanism of data governance.
  • Data Standards Development: Develop data standards and specifications, and monitor the implementation of data standards and specifications during the implementation of relevant projects.
  • Data Quality Management: Develop data quality standards and data quality control plans, conduct data quality management, tracking and monitoring, and establish data quality evaluation systems.
  • Architectural Design Leadership: Lead in delivering the architectural design of enterprise-scale, end-to-end solutions for major projects, guiding projects in their technology and vendor selections.
  • Business Alignment: Ensure business alignment by translating business strategy and direction into technical vision, strategy, and roadmap.

5. DevOps Architect Role Purpose

  • DevOps Architecture: Define DevOps architecture and associated cloud strategy and own the roadmap for CI/CD implementation/rollout.
  • CI/CD Tools Management: Architect, design, build, integrate, improve, and manage CI/CD tools and pipelines.
  • Technology Integration: Drive the identification and incorporation of new, disruptive technologies into the architecture.
  • Continuous Integration Infrastructure: Responsible for the set-up, maintenance, and ongoing development of continuous build/integration infrastructure.
  • Troubleshooting: Actively troubleshoot any issues in CI/CD pipelines to make the delivery process faster.
  • Collaboration: Work closely with multiple product teams and assist in making the DevOps infrastructure more scalable and improving performance.
  • Version Control Management: Move development and configuration work between version control branches.
  • Deployment Resolution: Resolve deployment issues with development and configuration teams.
  • Complex Issue Resolution: Lead the resolution of technically complex, cross-system, or long-term issues that impact business operations.
  • IT Architecture Development: Lead the development of the IT architecture and facilitate its adoption.
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