What Is the Best Cloud Migration Team Structure?

What Is the Best Cloud Migration Team Structure?

Having a structured and well-defined project is nothing without the right team. Today we talk about or cloud migration team structure. Which roles are the most important ones, and what skills do they need to possess.

Our core cloud migration team usually consists of 4 members: project manager, solution architect, DevOps engineer, and SysOps engineer - let's cover each one in more detail.

Project Manager

Project management plays an essential role in every complex project. Project managers in IT take care of project planning and phases; they help resolve roadblocks and ensure that the project satisfies project requirements and is delivered on time.

Project managers must have the following three skills.

• Ability to execute and inspire: project manager must inspire the technical team to execute tasks and deliver the project in time.
• Clear communication: project manager must communicate with the technical team and project sponsors clearly and understandably.
• Analytics and organizational skills: project manager must have strong analytical and organizational skills to steer the project in the right direction and create meaningful project reports.

Solution Architect

Solution architecture is the process of creating a set of 'enterprise solutions, applications, and processes that integrate with each other to address specific needs and requirements.' Gartner defines solution architecture as an architectural description of a specific technical solution.

A solution architect is a person responsible for planning and designing a technical solution. Solution architect leads the development of a technical solution to satisfy business, information and technical requirements.

A solution architect is a person with 10+ years of experience in various areas of IT and has a broad knowledge of different technologies, tools and techniques. Their job is to take a set of requirements and turn them into a robust and scalable solution.

Solution architects must have the following five skills.

• Clear and knowledgeable communication: SA must be capable of presenting technical aspects, selling points, risks and challenges of a specific solution to other team members and project sponsors.
• Risk management: SA must understand risks and design the solution that mitigates risks and eliminates any factors that may create problems in the solution implementation or production.
• Technical skills: SA must be an expert in technologies used in the project to understand technical capabilities and limitations.
• People skills: SA must have good people skills to inspire confidence and establish credibility within the team.
• Resource management: SA must be able to use resources efficiently and effectively to satisfy projects cost expectations.

DevOps Engineer

DevOps is the model under which development and operations teams are joined into one single team. This practice emerged in recent years due to more complex deploy procedures and the need for more frequent software updates.

DevOps engineers close the gap between developers and system administrators. They take care of the processes, tools, and methodologies needed throughout the software deployment process.

DevOps engineer must have the following four skills.

• DevOps model: DevOps engineer must understand DevOps practices and techniques to simplify the development process.
• Technical skills: DevOps engineer must understand the software development lifecycle as well as system operation.
• People skills: DevOps engineer must be able to work and communicate with other team members.
• Automation: automation is one of the most important benefits of the DevOps model. DevOps engineer must be able to automate repetitive and error-prone tasks.

SysOps Engineer

SysOps stands for system operations. SysOps is an IT function that takes care of monitoring, operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure systems.

SysOps engineers are responsible for the functioning of the cloud environment on which other services can run.

SysOps engineer must have the following three skills.

• System knowledge: SysOps engineer must understand the system architecture and vital parameters that give insight into platforms health.
• Technical skills: SysOps engineer must understand the cloud platform and available services to utilize them in the most efficient way.
• People skills: SysOps engineer must be able to work and communicate with other team members.

Conclusion

In this article, we covered all the essential roles of a successful cloud team. The project manager is the person that drives the whole project and reports about the progress. The solution architect is the person that designs the architecture of the system based on the technical and business requirements. DevOps and SysOps engineers implement the solution based on the system architecture.

As AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies of every industry and size solve their infrastructure problems with cloud migration.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

---