Greg Powell

The best way to bounce back from setbacks in your cloud computing career is to accept there will be setbacks. No one‘s path to success is linear or ever complete. Realize everyone deals with struggles in their career whether you know about it or not. You’re not alone.

Think BIG. Build a Data Lake backed by Amazon S3. You get high availability, fault tolerance, and durability. The Data Lake breaks your data out of bespoke silos historically locked in relational databases and data warehouses. You will still have those downstream data stores, but your data pipelines will consist of ingest, process, store, secure, and governance to fuel business insights. You can maintain a copy of raw data and curated data and empower unique personas (i.e. Data Scientists, Developers, BI Analysts, etc.) to have access to the data they need to support business use cases without having to lean on the infra team to build out one-off pipelines. Takes work up front to build, but business speed and agility are the end result.

Here are 3 ways to showcase your technical proficiency in cloud computing: 1) Earn AWS Certifications 2) Build and share your tech portfolio 3) Post and Blog about your learnings

It can be intimidating for a junior level system architect to speak up in a meeting filled with senior technical staff in attendance. Continue to work on building your knowledge as a junior system architect. Additionally, get in the habit of speaking up. Don't hesitate to offer your take. One advantage you have as a junior system architect is a 'fresh set of eyes'. You can offer up new ideas to old problems. Be bold. You'll never make progress or advance your career meaningfully keeping quiet.

Stop everything you're doing and conduct an end-to-end security review. Build a heat map of green, yellow, and red security items where green is good, yellow is needs improvement, and red is critical. Prioritize critical security findings first and then focus on remaining security remediations. Put measures in place to prevent a future lack of security in system architecture from surfacing.

Simple. Always start with the business use case first. Once this has been defined work backwards from it and adopt cloud services in support of delivering the desired outcomes that business use case should achieve.