Maximizing your cloud journey: Engaging an AWS Solutions Architect

AWS offers over 200 fully-featured services, providing unparalleled opportunities for businesses of all sizes. However, this abundance of choice can be overwhelming, leaving many customers uncertain about where to begin or which services best fit their specific needs. This is where AWS Solutions Architects, a free resource, can help by wearing three crucial hats: technical advisor, customer advocate, and educator.

Solutions Architects are technical advisors

Since 2006, Solutions Architects have been architecting thousands of solutions across a wide variety of business verticals and use cases. From this experience, Solutions Architects have identified best practices and core strategies for architecting systems in the cloud such as cloud migration efforts, reviewing workload architectures, and providing guidance on how to address high-risk issues.

As technical advisors, Solutions Architects use two main mechanisms:

1) The Well-Architected Review

Solutions Architects are the keepers of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, helping you follow best practices to develop cloud solutions that are secure, sustainable, resilient, efficient, and managed with operational excellence. You can leverage your Solutions Architect’s expertise via an AWS Well-Architected review even if you have built infrastructure on your own. This process is intended to be lightweight and is a conversation instead of an audit. The purpose of reviewing an architecture is to identify any critical issues or areas that could be improved with a set of recommended actions.

If you prefer to evaluate your workload on your own, you can leverage the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool). This is a service in the cloud that provides a consistent process for measuring your architectures using AWS best practices. In addition to AWS best practices, you can use custom lenses within the Well-Architected Tool to measure your workload using your own best practices. You can review the results with your Solutions Architect for further insights and to develop an action plan.

2) Whiteboarding

You’ll often hear Solutions Architects talk about whiteboarding, which is the process of recommending a solution by diagramming an AWS architecture in real-time. Whiteboarding can be performed in person on a physical whiteboard or online using an interactive diagramming tool. When preparing for a whiteboarding session, Solutions Architects will take your desired outcome, budget, and AWS team experience into consideration when designing an architecture that is efficient, cost effective, and easy to implement.

Solutions Architects are customer advocates

At AWS, a key pillar is working backwards from our customers. As customer advocates, Solutions Architects are your voice within AWS. They take the time to deeply understand your business objectives, constraints, and vision. This understanding allows them to effectively communicate your needs to various internal AWS teams, ensuring that everyone from your greater account team is aligned with your goals. Solutions Architects are well-versed in bridging the gap between your business and AWS’s internal structure.

As Solutions Architects learn more about what you’re building, they will engage other teams as needed. For example, if you need help with technical troubleshooting, your Solutions Architect can connect you with AWS Support and make recommendations for which support tier is best for your business. For customers who need support with any hands-on implementation, your Solutions Architect can also connect you with AWS Professional Services or the AWS Partner Network to implement infrastructure build-out on your behalf. Lastly, your Solutions Architect can work with you to evaluate if your team should manage your solution in-house or pass the management overhead to AWS Managed Services.

If your team needs a specific service integration or feature, be sure to share this feedback with your Solutions Architect. Your Solutions Architect will collect your feedback and submit it to the service teams as product feature requests (PFRs). This ensures your team’s needs are considered when the service teams decide which features to prioritize. By working closely with your Solutions Architect, you can influence the evolution of AWS services to better support your team’s requirements. This customer-centric approach is fundamental to how we innovate at AWS.

Solutions Architects are educators

AWS offers Immersion Days and Solution Focused Immersion Days (SFIDs), which provide hands-on, interactive learning experiences led by AWS experts at no cost. Immersion Days are customizable events delivered by Solution Architects, focusing on specific AWS services and solutions tailored to customer use cases. During an Immersion Day, customers work hands-on with AWS services under the guidance of Solution Architects, gaining practical experience and insights specific to their business needs. SFIDs, on the other hand, are virtual multi-customer immersion days led by a team of Solution Architects, offering a more general approach while providing valuable exposure to various AWS services, architectural patterns, and best practices. Both Immersion Days and SFIDs offer comprehensive and interactive learning experiences, allowing participants to ask questions, engage in group discussions, and participate in hands-on activities, equipping participants to gain a deeper understanding of how to build secure, scalable, and cost-effective solutions on AWS.

Learn more about architecting on AWS

By leveraging AWS Training and Certification resources, your team can gain a deep understanding of AWS services, architectural patterns, and best practices, empowering them to design, deploy, and optimize secure and robust solutions on AWS.

Take your learning further by pursuing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and AWS Solutions Architect – Professional certifications. These AWS Certifications are valuable when working with your Solutions Architect as it creates a common technical language to enable more informed and productive conversations.

To prepare for the exams, explore AWS Skill Builder, our online learning center with digital training options that cover a wide range of AWS services and concepts. Take advantage of more than 600 free digital courses, learning plans, and official practice questions to prepare for AWS Certifications. Skill Builder also offers enhanced learning resources via the subscription option, including self-paced AWS Builder Labs, AWS Cloud Quest, AWS Industry Quest, and intensive exam preparation courses, all of which allow you to practice and apply your knowledge in a real AWS environment. By completing these courses, you and your team can gain practical experience in designing, deploying, and managing AWS resources, which is essential for effective cloud workloads.

AWS Workshops is another valuable resource, offering self-paced, hands-on workshops covering a wide range of AWS services and solutions. These workshops are designed to help participants develop practical skills and gain hands-on experience with AWS services through guided, step-by-step instructions and real-world scenarios. Workshops are available at no cost, but customers are responsible for any AWS charges incurred when launching services for the workshop. Check out this blog to learn more about AWS Workshops and how they can accelerate your learning here.

Getting started

AWS Solution Architects are on stand-by ready to help you evaluate your current architecture designs based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, ensuring that your workloads are secure, and to provide targeted training material to help you and your team learn the AWS services that will bring the most value to your business.

New and existing customers can get in contact with the AWS Sales Team by filling out the Contact Us form. If you are brand new to AWS, a sales representative will connect you with a Solutions Architect who will dive deeper into your existing workload and/or vision to recommend AWS services that will work best for your team. If your business decides to move forward with AWS, your account will get assigned a dedicated account team that will be your go-to point of contact for AWS inquiries moving forward. Existing customers can contact their account team directly. If you are unaware of your account team’s contact information, fill out the Contact Us form and the sales representative will route you to your dedicated account team.

Happy architecting!