[chatgpt] Comparison and Transition Paths: Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect, and DevOps Roles

Note: This page is an AI-generated (gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07) translation from Traditional Chinese and may contain minor inaccuracies.

📌 Introduction

⭐ Note
This article was generated by ChatGPT and published after human review. Content is for reference only. It mainly discusses the relationship between DevOps, SA, and EA roles and how a DevOps engineer can transition to an SA or EA role.

🧭 Role Positioning and Differences Overview

• Enterprise Architect (EA): Operates at the enterprise level to define long-term IT strategy and architecture blueprints, ensuring technical solutions align with the company mission and business objectives ^{[1] [2]}

  • EA is like a city planner, drawing the master plan for the company’s technical land ^[3]
  • They focus on the big picture and long-term strategy, defining standards and governance frameworks to guide technical decision-making.

• Solution Architect (SA): Focuses on a specific product or project, assesses business requirements, and designs the corresponding technical solution ^[1:1]

  • SA acts as a bridge, connecting business needs to the final technical implementation ^[1:2]
  • They are similar to an architect who draws the blueprint for a single building (a single system), ensuring the solution complies with enterprise architecture standards while meeting project requirements ^[3:1]
  • SA pays attention to concrete details and implementation, leading teams to translate the architecture into deliverable systems.

• DevOps Engineer: Focuses on software delivery pipelines and operations automation, responsible for collaboration between development and operations, implementing CI/CD processes, automated deployment, and system monitoring to ensure reliable and fast software delivery ^[2:1]

  • DevOps emphasizes tools and process optimization, like the city’s infrastructure maintainer, building roads and pipelines (deployment processes) and keeping traffic flowing (stable operations).

Commonality: All three roles require broad technical knowledge and good communication and coordination skills, but they emphasize different aspects. EA prioritizes strategy and a holistic view, SA emphasizes project technical design and coordination for implementation, and DevOps emphasizes engineering practice and automation efficiency. Depending on company size and industry, whether these roles exist and how responsibilities are divided vary — the larger and more complex the company, the more necessary it is to clearly distinguish roles like EA and SA ^[1:3].

Below we describe the job content, required skills, and common technology differences for EA, SA, and DevOps in startup and financial industry contexts, and then offer concrete advice and learning resources for DevOps transitioning to SA or EA.

🏗️ Enterprise Architect (EA)

• Role Responsibilities and Positioning: The EA is responsible for creating the overall technical blueprint in an organization and ensuring IT strategy aligns with business strategy ^[1:4]
  • They analyze internal and external enterprise needs, identify capability gaps, and plan future technology roadmaps ^[1:5]
  • EA typically does not dive into implementation details but sets standards and delegates implementation tasks to Solution Architects or Technical Architects ^[1:6]
  • A key EA task is architecture governance: using architectural models and principles to guide projects to follow enterprise standards and avoid siloed approaches. EAs often collaborate with senior management to determine which emerging technologies (e.g., AI, blockchain) can provide competitive advantage ^[1:7]
• Core Skills: EAs need cross-domain technical knowledge and business acumen. They must be familiar with enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF, Zachman), understand business processes and industry trends, and connect complex technical concepts to business strategy ^{[1:8] [1:9]}
  • EA should have excellent strategic planning and analytical skills, using architecture views and models to analyze the overall IT landscape, identify bottlenecks, and plan improvements ^[1:10]
  • They also require strong communication and influence to articulate IT strategy value to executives and coordinate departments to reach consensus ^[1:11]
  • Soft skills: EA must work systematically and focus on architecture governance to ensure technical decisions comply with corporate standards and regulations.
• Common Technologies and Tools: Because EA looks at the big picture, their technical focus is on architecture modeling and strategy management tools rather than specific programming languages. Common tools include enterprise architecture management (EAM) tools like Archi, Sparx EA, LeanIX for drawing architecture blueprints, asset inventories, and roadmaps ^[1:12]
  • EA also needs to be familiar with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and enterprise solutions (databases, ERP, middleware) at a high level to make strategic technology selection decisions. Although EAs don’t write code, understanding technical standards and frameworks (like microservices architecture, enterprise integration patterns, security frameworks) is important to assess feasibility and compatibility.
• Startup vs. Financial Industry Differences: In startups, companies are small and products are single-focused; EA may be played by the CTO, architecture is simple and evolves quickly with emphasis on agility rather than strict governance. Therefore a startup EA may concurrently act as SA and technical lead and set architecture direction flexibly. In contrast, in large financial enterprises (banks, insurers) with complex business lines and high compliance demands, there are usually dedicated EA teams. Financial EAs tend to follow formal architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF), produce standardized architecture blueprints and governance processes, ensuring systems (legacy mainframes, data warehouses, new apps) comply with strategy and regulations. Financial EAs also focus on risk control, data privacy, and regulatory compliance, and are particularly cautious when introducing new technologies.

🧱 Solution Architect (SA)

• Role Responsibilities and Positioning: Solution Architects focus on specific projects or products. They take the principles and blueprints set by EAs, analyze business needs deeply, and design feasible technical solutions ^[1:13]
  • SA work begins with requirements analysis: confirming functional and quality requirements (QA) with product managers and business units, then designing an architecture solution (system component decomposition, module interactions, data flows, etc.) among many technical options. During design, SA must balance enterprise-wide architecture with technical implementation details ^[1:14]
  • Once the solution is approved, SA often assumes a technical leadership role: guiding development teams to understand the design, selecting technologies, and ensuring the architecture is properly implemented throughout development. SA also assesses implementation risks to ensure the delivered system matches the original architecture and requirements ^[1:15]
  • In short, SA is the technical lead in a project, ensuring the right solution is correctly implemented.
• Core Skills: As a bridge between business and technology, SA needs both breadth and depth. They must master system design principles and architecture patterns (layered architectures, microservices, event-driven, cloud-native design), choosing suitable architecture for different problems. Typically coming from senior developer backgrounds, SAs have deep experience in at least one or two technology stacks (e.g., Java/Spring, .NET, or specific front-end/back-end domains) and understand code-level practices to design realizable solutions. Additionally, SA must have good communication and coordination to explain architecture to development teams, discuss consistency with EA, and explain how the technical solution solves business problems to non-technical stakeholders. Project management skills are also important, as SAs often act as technical project managers ensuring aligned progress ^[1:16]
  • Overall, SA must be able to analyze complex problems and decompose them into executable plans while possessing the soft skills to lead implementation.
• Common Technologies and Tools: SA technologies vary by industry and project but typically include a broad set of development and architecture tools. For cloud platforms, SA needs familiarity with AWS, Azure, GCP and the ability to use cloud services (compute, storage, databases, messaging) to build scalable systems ^[2:2]
  • For application architecture, SA commonly uses UML or the C4 Model to draw system diagrams and architecture tools (Visio, draw.io, PlantUML). Languages and frameworks depend on domain: backend in finance often favors Java/Spring or .NET; startups might use Python/Django, Node.js/Express, Go. SA must choose appropriate databases (SQL vs NoSQL), message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), etc. Beyond development tech, SA should understand DevOps CI/CD tools principles—containers, Kubernetes, CI tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI)—to design deployable and operable solutions ^[2:3]
  • SA also needs to consider performance and security, so familiarity with performance testing tools and security best practices is necessary. In short, SA’s tech knowledge covers everything needed to take a system from whiteboard to production.
• Startup vs. Financial Industry Differences: In startups, SAs often also serve as technical team leads. With limited staff, SAs may design architecture and directly code, being more hands-on. Startups emphasize rapid iteration, so SAs favor lightweight frameworks and cloud services to speed development and evolve after launch. In financial enterprises, SAs are usually distinct roles and less involved in daily coding, focusing on architecture design and coordination. Financial SAs face extensive legacy system integration and must propose solutions for business domains (payments, risk control) while complying with enterprise architecture standards. They often use enterprise-grade technologies (IBM WebSphere, Oracle DB) and designs that stress security and transactional consistency. Financial SAs must closely align with EA, coordinate with project managers and external vendors. In short, startup SAs are more versatile and fast-moving; financial SAs are more specialized and ensure reliability in strict environments.

🔧 DevOps Engineer

• Role Responsibilities and Positioning: DevOps engineers aim to bridge development (Dev) and operations (Ops), establishing efficient, automated software delivery processes. Core responsibilities include designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines, automating build, test, and deployment processes ^[2:4]; writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, etc., to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure ^[2:5]; configuring and managing continuous monitoring and alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch) to ensure system stability ^[2:6]; promoting configuration management and automation (Ansible, Chef) to reduce human error. DevOps engineers also maintain environment consistency (dev, test, staging, production), helping development teams deliver and iterate quickly. In short, DevOps focuses on the efficiency and reliability of the software delivery lifecycle and is key to promoting a culture of rapid delivery and continuous improvement.
• Core Skills: DevOps needs broad toolchain knowledge and collaboration skills. Technically, they must be proficient with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD), version control (Git), container tech (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes). Deep knowledge of OS and networking is necessary since deployment environments involve Linux tuning, service config, routing, firewall setups. DevOps often has scripting/programming skills—Python, Shell, Go—to write automation scripts or tools. They also need to understand cloud architectures and services (AWS, Azure, GCP) as modern apps run in cloud or hybrid cloud. Soft skills: DevOps acts as a glue between dev and ops teams and needs excellent communication and coordination to drive cultural change. When incidents occur, DevOps is often the main incident coordinator, quickly contacting relevant people to resolve issues ^[4]
  • They should have a continuous learning mindset as tools and best practices evolve rapidly (e.g., Service Mesh, GitOps).
• Common Technologies: DevOps daily work revolves around automation and infrastructure tech. Common tech includes:
  • Cloud & Containers: AWS, Azure, GCP and services (EC2, S3, RDS, etc.), Linux containers (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift). DevOps writes Kubernetes YAML, uses Helm charts to manage containerized apps.
  • CI/CD & Configuration Management: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI for CI/CD; Ansible, Chef, Puppet for config management and automation; Terraform, CloudFormation for IaC ^[2:7]
    • These tools enable one-click deployments and infrastructure automation.
  • Monitoring & Logging: Prometheus, Grafana for metrics; ELK/EFK (Elasticsearch + Kibana + Logstash/Fluentd) for centralized logging; cloud monitoring (CloudWatch, Azure Monitor). DevOps sets alerts and dashboards for real-time system health.
  • Version Control & Collaboration: Git is essential; understanding Git Flow or Pull Request workflows helps team collaboration. Nexus/Artifactory for binary management, Docker Registry for container images.
  • Programming Languages: Although not focused on business logic, DevOps writes scripts and tools. Shell scripting for system tasks, Python for automation scripts, and increasingly Go for DevOps tools (e.g., Kubernetes CLI tools). DevOps should also be able to read application code (Java, Python, JavaScript) to debug issues.
• Startup vs. Financial Industry Differences: In startups, DevOps is crucial early on to build cloud infrastructure and CI/CD from scratch. Because of rapid iteration, DevOps picks highly automated, cloud-first solutions (often serverless) to reduce infrastructure maintenance. In small teams, DevOps may touch development and testing, giving a broader skill set and more agility. In large financial companies, DevOps adoption may face traditional processes and compliance constraints. Financial organizations often introduce DevOps gradually via pilot teams. DevOps in finance must adapt to strict change management and security audits, adding approval and logging to automation. Some financial institutions still run on on-prem data centers, so DevOps manages hybrid cloud (on-prem + private cloud + public cloud) and ensures high availability and disaster recovery. Finance places heavier emphasis on access control and monitoring, so toolchains must comply with security policies (e.g., sensitive data not uploaded to public cloud, CI/CD pipelines require change approvals). Overall, startup DevOps focuses on innovation, speed, and iteration; financial DevOps focuses on stability, compliance, and balancing speed with risk.

Summary: Depending on industry and scale, EA, SA, and DevOps roles and divisions are flexible. In small startups, there may be no formal EA title or one person wearing multiple hats; in large financial organizations, the three roles are distinct yet closely collaborative. As companies grow, architecture governance becomes more important, typically evolving from informal tech-lead-centered design to establishing SA teams, and eventually introducing EA for strategic oversight ^[3:2]. Understanding these roles across contexts helps craft appropriate career and learning plans.

🗺️ DevOps Transition Roadmap

DevOps engineers accumulate extensive implementation experience and a deep understanding of the delivery process, which provides a strong foundation for transitioning to an architect role ^[4:1]. However, moving from a tools-and-execution-focused DevOps role to a higher-level Solution Architect (SA) or Enterprise Architect (EA) role requires further growth in technical depth and breadth, business understanding, and architectural thinking. Below is a step-by-step learning and mindset-change guide:

1. Technical and Knowledge Learning Sequence (Foundations → Advanced → Practice):
   • Foundation Stage: Strengthen computer science and software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, network protocols, operating systems to build theoretical foundations for architecture. Also learn software design principles and object-oriented principles (e.g., SOLID) and basic design patterns. For those from DevOps backgrounds, this fills theoretical gaps in software design. Classic books (Clean Code, Design Patterns) and online courses can solidify basics.
   • Advanced Stage: Deep-dive into software architecture theories and patterns. Study architecture styles (monolith vs. microservices, distributed systems principles, event-driven, CQRS), architecture patterns (layered, hexagonal, clean architecture), and trade-offs in architectural decisions. Also learn enterprise architecture frameworks (for aspiring EAs, like TOGAF, BDAT) to master governance methods. For aspiring SAs, mastering system design in one or two mainstream technologies is important—e.g., designing architectures for high-concurrency websites, ensuring ACID properties in financial transaction systems. Also expand cloud and infrastructure knowledge: since DevOps already knows CI/CD and containers, further learn cloud architecture design (AWS Well-Architected Framework, hybrid cloud), and network and security architecture (virtual networks, VPC design, zero-trust). ^[5]
     • Additionally, study database fundamentals and large distributed systems (SQL vs NoSQL trade-offs, CAP theorem, consensus algorithms like Paxos/Raft) to make more forward-looking technology selections.
   • Practice Stage: Theory is not enough—start architecture design practice. One way is to take on small architecture design tasks at work: redesign a module, optimize deployment topology, and discuss your design with the team. Participate in design reviews to observe senior architects’ trade-offs. If at work you lack opportunities, build your own architecture projects: design a URL shortener or an e-commerce system architecture covering front-end/back-end, DB, caching, messaging, and write architecture docs plus PoC code. Practice reveals gaps between theory and reality and teaches trade-offs. This experience becomes valuable for future architect roles.
2. Fill Business Understanding and Architecture Design Skills: Architects are technical designers who also understand business. DevOps professionals should strengthen domain knowledge and requirements analysis.
   • Deepen domain knowledge: Regardless of industry (finance, e-commerce, etc.), proactively learn business processes and domain expertise. For finance, understand core banking systems, payment clearing, and compliance; for e-commerce, learn order flows, inventory, SEO. Ask the business team, attend business meetings, or read industry reports. Business insight enables designing systems that truly meet business needs.
   • Practice requirements analysis and architecture design: Train extracting technical requirements from vague business needs. Try writing architecture documents or technical proposals: analyze functional and non-functional requirements (performance, scalability, security, compliance), propose architecture (upstream/downstream relationships, component decomposition, data/control flows), and justify key technology choices. This improves holistic thinking and architecture decision-making. Compare your proposals with industry cases or seek feedback from experienced architects.
   • Learn architecture review and decision-making: Architects frequently make trade-off decisions. Build this skill by learning architecture evaluation methods (e.g., ATAM), reading system design case studies, and understanding how others balance conflicting requirements (availability vs consistency, latency vs throughput, dev efficiency vs maintainability). With experience, you’ll make architecture decisions more confidently.
3. Recommended Project Participation Types and Scope: To transition smoothly, intentionally seek projects and responsibilities that build architecture skills:
   • Start with small architecture designs: Volunteer for small projects or modules to design within your team. As DevOps you know delivery flows—try going beyond pure ops to participate in system design. Examples: design a logging architecture, optimize module decomposition, or lead a performance bottleneck refactor. These moderate-scope tasks build design experience and confidence.
   • Engage in end-to-end solutions: Aim to participate in the full product lifecycle, not just delivery. Join a new product from requirements, architecture, development to deployment, observing how architects interact with stakeholders and make design choices. Volunteer to own sub-system architecture. End-to-end involvement fosters a holistic view of how each stage impacts architecture.
   • Join architecture reviews or design boards: Many large companies have architecture review committees. Even as an observer, joining these discussions exposes you to company-wide architectural concerns and what senior architects care about. If possible, ask questions and offer comments to show your interest. This can lead to mentorship or more architecture opportunities.
   • Act as liaison/coordinator: Use DevOps’ cross-team collaboration to be a technical coordinator—connecting front-end, back-end, DB, and ops to ensure smooth integration. This helps you view systems from a higher level and practices coordinating multiple stakeholders, a daily architects’ activity ^[1:17]
     • By playing a “small architect” role in projects, you’ll start to perform parts of an architect’s job.
   • Seek mentors and feedback: If experienced SAs or EAs exist in your company, proactively ask for mentorship and request that they review your architecture proposals. Invite feedback and improve. Mentorship accelerates identifying gaps and targeted improvement.
4. Mindset Shift Recommendations (from tool-oriented to strategy-oriented): Transitioning to an architect is not only about skills but also about a change in mindset:
   • From doer to designer: DevOps is used to hands-on problem solving, but architects must view problems from a higher level. Shift from “How do I get this done?” to “What should we do and why?” Focus on what to do and why, cultivating systems thinking and maintaining a mental model of the entire system and how a decision affects it.
   • From tool-driven to problem-driven: DevOps often solves problems with tools; architects focus on the underlying business problem and requirement priorities. Practice asking: “What business problem is this requirement solving? What are the success metrics?” Then select technology accordingly. Avoid jumping to frameworks/tools before defining the problem.
   • From chasing new tech to emphasizing stable architectures: DevOps enjoys new tools, but architects are more conservative, emphasizing long-term implications of technology choices. Develop a “technology calm”: evaluate maturity, fit with existing landscape, and business value. Adopt new tech only if it solves key problems; reject it if it only adds complexity. Shift from focusing on “cool tech” to “value created by tech.”
   • From local optimization to global trade-offs: DevOps often optimizes delivery efficiency and single-system reliability; architects must make global trade-offs. A solution that is optimal for one service might increase complexity or create tech silos at the ecosystem level. Learn to weigh performance, cost, developer productivity, maintainability, scalability, etc., and accept that “there is no perfect architecture, only one suitable for current needs.” Set priorities and allow secondary aspects to make concessions.
   • Improve communication and leadership: Moving from individual contributor to architect means influencing and leading others. Improve communication skills to explain complex technical ideas simply to non-technical people—this is basic for EA/SA ^[6]
     • Practice listening and negotiation: architecture often requires reconciling different teams’ interests. Ask for others’ input and balance principle with flexibility. Build a trusted technical leadership presence so teams follow your decisions. Start by hosting technical discussions, sharing learnings, and increasing visibility.
   • Strategic thinking: For those aiming for EA, cultivate strategic thinking: watch market and competitive trends, and ask “Where will the business be in 2–3 years and what technology preparation is needed?” EAs work with executives on IT strategy, so follow industry reports and competitors’ tech moves, and practice discussing technology in business terms. Shift from focusing on execution to viewing technology as a strategic resource for business goals.

The above steps aren’t strictly linear and can be pursued in parallel. For example, practice while learning theory and concurrently build soft skills. In this transition, the DevOps background is actually an advantage: your grasp of the full delivery process gives you a stronger holistic view and cross-domain experience than many developers, which is essential for architects ^[4:2]. Many have successfully moved from DevOps to SA and even to EA. The key is patience and passion—treat each project as an opportunity to develop architectural thinking; your DevOps experience will become a unique asset in architecture decisions ^[4:3].

⚡ Learning Resources

Transitioning requires continuous learning. The resources below include GitHub repos, online courses, books, and professional blogs/communities to provide in-depth knowledge and practical experience:

💻 GitHub

• Solution Architect Learning Path: github.com
  • A curated learning collection for aspiring architects covering architecture intro, fundamentals, cloud platforms, architecture patterns, tools, and certifications—good for DevOps engineers to systematically learn architecture.
• Awesome Software Architecture: github.com
  • A community-maintained software architecture resources list aggregating articles, videos, and exercises covering architecture patterns and principles—an excellent entry point to grasp architecture scope.
• System Design Primer: github.com
  • Well-known system design tutorial with guides on building large systems, common interview design problems, and real case studies (designing Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Great for practicing architecture thinking through examples.
• Awesome DevOps: A curated list of DevOps tools and practices. Even if you already know DevOps, this helps check if you’ve missed areas relevant to architecture decisions (new infra tech or SRE practices). The Awesome DevOps list covers cloud, config management, containers, monitoring, etc. awesome-devops.xyz

🎓 Online Courses

• Coursera: Software Design and Architecture Specialization: coursera.org
  • A university-backed series (Software Design and Architecture) teaching how to apply design principles, patterns, and architecture to create reusable, maintainable systems.
• Coursera: TOGAF Certification Course: coursera.org
  • Focuses on enterprise architecture core concepts (BDAT—business/data/application/technology architecture domains, ADM), helpful for understanding EA frameworks and methods.
• Pluralsight: Developer to Architect: classcentral.com
  • Designed for developers and DevOps moving toward architect roles, covering the role, required skills, and how to perform architect responsibilities across the project lifecycle. Emphasizes design and communication for technical and non-technical stakeholders—an excellent roadmap for career transition.
• Udemy: Microservices Architecture & Patterns: Platforms like Udemy have many hands-on courses (microservices, cloud-native design). Choose highly-rated courses taught by experienced architects to apply theory to practice.

📘 Recommended Books

• Fundamentals of Software Architecture — Mark Richards & Neal Ford. A comprehensive book covering architecture patterns, quality attribute trade-offs, and architect responsibilities—great for DevOps engineers expanding their architecture perspective.
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software — Eric Evans. Teaches integrating business knowledge into technical design and modeling core domains with business experts; useful for improving business understanding and design alignment.
• The Software Architect Elevator — Gregor Hohpe. Focuses on the architect’s evolving role in digital transformation and soft skills. The “elevator” metaphor highlights switching between executive strategy and technical details—helpful for DevOps moving into enterprise roles.
• Accelerate — Nicole Forsgren et al. Research-based book about how DevOps practices drive business value. For DevOps-to-architect transitions, this helps link technical practices to business outcomes and guides decisions that prioritize business value.
• Software Architecture in Practice — Len Bass et al. A classic covering many aspects of software architecture with case studies—recommended for systematic learning.
• Also, Martin Fowler’s works (e.g., Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture) and his blog provide accessible insights on enterprise architectures and refactoring.

🌐 Blogs and Professional Communities

• Medium Tech Columns: Many architects and cloud practitioners share articles on Medium (ITnext, Towards Data Science, The Startup). Personal posts about transitioning from DevOps to architect or cloud case studies provide practical advice.
• Reddit communities:
  • r/softwarearchitecture – discussions on architecture topics, case studies, and book recommendations.
  • r/DevOps – DevOps topics often overlap with architecture decisions (CI/CD design, large-scale deployments).
  • r/cscareerquestions and r/ExperiencedDevs – career transition discussions with many first-hand accounts.
• Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange: Follow tags like architecture and system-design. Software Engineering Stack Exchange hosts many discussions on architecture and design decisions.
• InfoQ and IBM Developer: InfoQ has many microservices, architecture case studies, and enterprise governance articles (some in Chinese). IBM Developer and Microsoft Architecture Center offer architect guides and reference architectures.
• Professional organizations and forums: Join architecture forums or local meetups (The Open Group, IEEE Software). LinkedIn groups like “Software Architects” or “Enterprise Architecture Network” share professional posts and discussions—active participation helps build networks and absorb knowledge.
• Local communities and blogs: For Traditional Chinese readers, follow Taiwan/HK tech communities (e.g., iT 邦幫忙) and local architect meetups (Taiwan Architecture Summit) for region-specific practice and insights.

🔑 Keywords

• Enterprise Architecture Management Tools (EAM)
• The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)
• Zachman Framework
• Microservices Architecture
• Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP)
• Security Framework
• System Component Decomposition
• System Design Principles
• Architectural Patterns
• Layered Architecture
• Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)
• Cloud-Native Design
• Lightweight Frameworks
• Binary Release Management
• Container Image Management
• Docker Registry
• SOLID Principles
• Design Patterns
• Monolithic Application
• Distributed System Principles
• Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
• Hexagonal Architecture
• Clean Architecture
• Architectural Trade-offs
• Business/Data/Application/Technology Architecture (BDAT)
• Architecture Governance Methodology
• Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID)
• Zero Trust Security Model
• Consensus Algorithms
• Paxos Algorithm
• Raft Algorithm
• Architecture Documentation
• Technical Proposal
• Functional Requirement Analysis
• Non-Functional Requirement Analysis
• Architecture Solution Design
• System Upstream and Downstream Relationships
• Data Flow and Control Flow
• Technology Selection Rationale
• Architecture Evaluation Methods
• Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM)
• Architecture-level Trade-offs (Availability, Consistency, Latency, Throughput, Developer Efficiency, Maintainability)
• Architecture Development Method (ADM)

🔖 References

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1. Enterprise Architect vs. Solution Architect vs. Technical Architect
   https://www.leanix.net/en/wiki/ea/enterprise-architect-vs-solution-architect-vs-technical-architect-whats-the-difference ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

2. Distinguishing Between DevOps Roles and AWS Solution Architects
   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distinguishing-between-devops-roles-aws-solution-architects-yagci-6jbqf/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

3. Navigating the Architecture from Startup to Enterprise
   https://dilankam.medium.com/navigating-the-architecture-from-startup-to-enterprise-c355f6d3dd17 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

4. IT careers: 4 ways DevOps bolsters your architect skill set
   https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/devops-career-architecture ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

5. How to Seamlessly Transition from DevOps to Cloud Architect Role
   https://cloudmize.medium.com/how-to-seamlessly-transition-from-devops-to-cloud-architect-role-8eb8fe02cd5f ↩︎

6. How can I switch roles from DevOps to Architect?
   https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aorad5/how_can_i_switch_roles_from_devops_to_architect ↩︎