You know what really matters. Understanding when a small team should stick with their monolith because microservices would triple their operational overhead. Or knowing when that legacy app with specific dependencies runs better on a dedicated VM than forced into containers. That's the real value of architectural knowledge... matching the solution to the actual business need, not the latest trend.
This is exactly why I'm going for my Professional Cloud Architect certification. The ambitious goal is 2 months, realistic goal is by year end. Either way, I'm starting now.
The timing is perfect. FreeCodeCamp just released a full prep course literally yesterday (I'll add the link below if you're interested). When I saw it pop up on YouTube right as I was starting my prep, I was stoked.
My plan is simple. Tons of hands on work. The more I actually build things, the better these concepts stick. The Google Cloud Well Architected Framework is another part I'm really excited to dig into. It's built on five pillars... operational excellence, security privacy and compliance, reliability, cost optimization, and performance optimization. Each pillar comes with actual design principles and best practices you can apply right away. Like how the reliability pillar teaches you to design resilient and highly available workloads in the cloud.
I'll be posting more as I go through this journey, sharing what I learn along the way.
I'm documenting this journey to inspire and connect with others. If you've been putting a certification or an important goal to the side lately, this is your sign to get at it.
Stay curious.