From DevOps Engineer to Cloud Architect: a comprehensive guide for 2025

Cloud computing has matured into the dominant platform for modern software and hardware. DevOps engineers–specialists in automating software delivery and managing CI/CD pipelines–are increasingly moving into cloud architecture roles because organisations need leaders who can design secure, scalable platforms that meet business and regulatory requirements. This article explores how a DevOps engineer can transition to a cloud architect in 2025. It covers the difference between the roles, the qualifications and experience needed, the technical and soft skills to develop, recommended tools and certifications and ends with a hands‑on example of infrastructure design.

1. DevOps engineer vs cloud architect – why transition?

DevOps engineers sit at the intersection of development and operations. According to Yardstick’s comparison, they focus on building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, use tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI and Docker and work closely with developers to deliver updates quicklyyardstick.team. Cloud architects, by contrast, design and manage a company’s cloud computing strategy, choosing services and architectures that meet technical and business requirementsyardstick.team. Their responsibilities include designing scalable solutions, ensuring cost optimisation and security compliance and collaborating with other teams to implement the architectureyardstick.team.

The move from DevOps to cloud architecture appeals for several reasons:

• Strategic influence and higher compensation. Cloud architects occupy a senior, visionary role. They report to CIOs/CTOs and shape the long‑term cloud strategyyardstick.team. Industry analyses show that cloud architects earn higher salaries than DevOps engineers; Zero to Mastery cites average compensation around $202k in 2025zerotomastery.io.

2. Qualifications and experience

A formal degree in computer science or engineering helps but is not mandatory. Employers value hands‑on experience and a broad foundation in systems engineeringzerotomastery.io. Common backgrounds include:

• Operating systems and systems administration. Cloud architects need to understand multiple operating systems to manage different customers’ environments and to control memory, CPU and resource allocation

. Knowledge of Linux is essential, and familiarity with Windows servers is useful.

. They should also understand firewalls and encryption to provide physical and network security

and comply with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA

.

• Existing DevOps experience. Experience with CI/CD tools, configuration management and containerization provides a strong base from which to design infrastructurecloudmize.medium.com.

Recommended certifications

Certifications validate skills and open doors. Popular options include:

CertificationProviderFocusAWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate/ProfessionalAmazonDesigning architectures with AWS services, security and cost optimisation.Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect ExpertMicrosoftDesigning solutions on Azure, covering compute, storage, security and hybrid networking.Google Professional Cloud ArchitectGoogle CloudDesigning GCP architectures, analyzing and optimizing business and technical processesskillsoft.com.

Other useful credentials include the HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate (IaC) and vendor‑specific security certifications.

3. Key skills and aptitudes for cloud architects

Being a successful cloud architect in 2025 requires a mix of technical depth and soft skills. Below are the core competencies drawn from industry research (GeeksforGeeks, Trevi Group and Medium).

3.1 Technical skills

1. Multi‑cloud expertise and orchestration. Organisations increasingly deploy across multiple providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) to avoid vendor lock‑in. Architects must understand each platform’s services and manage multi‑cloud or hybrid networks

. Tools like Kubernetes, Docker and serverless platforms enable portabilitythetrevigroup.com.

.

. Understanding how to interpret and draw conclusions from data allows architects to assess system performance

.

. Architects must also handle server virtualization and container networking

.

3.2 Soft skills

1. Strategic thinking and design. Cloud architects act like building architects; they think strategically to design secure and effective cloud solutions that address business problems

. Understanding both current and legacy systems enables them to integrate new architectures smoothly

.

. Teamwork skills foster collaboration, cooperation and tolerance

.

.

.

4. Tools and technologies

A future cloud architect should be comfortable with a variety of platforms and tools:

CategoryExamples and notesCloud platformsAWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are the big three. Familiarity with core services (compute, storage, networking, databases, serverless) across at least two providers is valuable

.Containerization & orchestrationDocker for packaging and Kubernetes for orchestrating container workloads; Fargate, ECS and AKS for managed container services. Container experience is common to both DevOps and cloud architecturecloudmize.medium.com.Infrastructure as CodeTools such as Terraform, CloudFormation and Pulumi allow declarative infrastructure provisioning and integrate into CI/CD pipelines.CI/CD and DevOps toolingJenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. Even as a cloud architect, understanding these tools helps integrate architecture changes into pipelineskodekloud.com.Monitoring and observabilityPrometheus, Grafana, Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor. Monitoring ensures that deployed architectures meet performance and reliability goalskodekloud.com.Security & identityIAM (AWS IAM, Azure AD), secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), firewalls and network ACLs, encryption tools.Scripting & automationLanguages like Python, Bash and PowerShell; API SDKs (Boto3 for AWS, Azure SDK for Python/Go).

5. Transition roadmap

Below is a suggested roadmap for a DevOps engineer aiming to become a cloud architect:

1. Leverage your DevOps foundation. Highlight your expertise in automation, CI/CD and containerization when applying for cloud roles. These skills demonstrate the ability to build efficient, repeatable systemscloudmize.medium.com.

. Take security‑focused courses.

6. Practical example: designing a highly available web application on AWS using Terraform

To illustrate the shift from DevOps to cloud architecture, this section presents a simplified example of designing an Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure using Terraform, an open‑source IaC tool. The goal is to build a highly available web application that automatically scales and is secured by firewalls.

6.1 Overview of the architecture

The architecture consists of:

1. VPC and subnets – a custom virtual network with public and private subnets across two availability zones.

The diagram below conceptually illustrates the setup (showed through description due to text constraints):

+---------------------------+                +------------------------------+
|        Public Subnet 1    |                |      Public Subnet 2         |
|  (AZ-a)                   |                |  (AZ-b)                      |
|  ALB (public)             |  <--->  ...    |  ALB (public)                |
+-------------+-------------+                +-------------+----------------+
              |                                                |
              v                                                v
      +--------------------+                        +---------------------+
      | EC2 instance ASG   |  (private)             | EC2 instance ASG    |
      | (web application)  |                        | (web application)   |
      +--------------------+                        +---------------------+
            |  |                                          |  |
            |  +------------------------------------------+  |
            |                     RDS (multi-AZ)             |
            +-----------------------------------------------+

6.2 Terraform configuration (simplified)

Create a directory with the following files.

providers.tf

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

network.tf

# Create a VPC
resource "aws_vpc" "main" {
  cidr_block           = "10.0.0.0/16"
  enable_dns_hostnames = true
  tags = { Name = "main-vpc" }
}

# Public subnets across two availability zones
resource "aws_subnet" "public" {
  count             = 2
  vpc_id            = aws_vpc.main.id
  cidr_block        = cidrsubnet(aws_vpc.main.cidr_block, 4, count.index)
  map_public_ip_on_launch = true
  availability_zone = element(["us-east-1a", "us-east-1b"], count.index)
  tags = { Name = "public-${count.index}" }
}

# Private subnets across two availability zones
resource "aws_subnet" "private" {
  count             = 2
  vpc_id            = aws_vpc.main.id
  cidr_block        = cidrsubnet(aws_vpc.main.cidr_block, 4, count.index + 2)
  availability_zone = element(["us-east-1a", "us-east-1b"], count.index)
  tags = { Name = "private-${count.index}" }
}

# Internet gateway and route table for public subnets
resource "aws_internet_gateway" "gw" {
  vpc_id = aws_vpc.main.id
}

resource "aws_route_table" "public" {
  vpc_id = aws_vpc.main.id
  route {
    cidr_block = "0.0.0.0/0"
    gateway_id = aws_internet_gateway.gw.id
  }
}

resource "aws_route_table_association" "public" {
  count          = 2
  subnet_id      = aws_subnet.public[count.index].id
  route_table_id = aws_route_table.public.id
}

security.tf

# Security group for the load balancer
resource "aws_security_group" "lb_sg" {
  name        = "lb-sg"
  description = "Allow HTTP from anywhere"
  vpc_id      = aws_vpc.main.id

  ingress {
    description      = "HTTP access"
    from_port        = 80
    to_port          = 80
    protocol         = "tcp"
    cidr_blocks      = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }

  egress {
    from_port        = 0
    to_port          = 0
    protocol         = "-1"
    cidr_blocks      = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }
}

# Security group for the EC2 instances
resource "aws_security_group" "app_sg" {
  name        = "app-sg"
  description = "Allow traffic from load balancer"
  vpc_id      = aws_vpc.main.id

  ingress {
    from_port        = 80
    to_port          = 80
    protocol         = "tcp"
    security_groups  = [aws_security_group.lb_sg.id]
  }

  egress {
    from_port        = 0
    to_port          = 0
    protocol         = "-1"
    cidr_blocks      = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }
}

compute.tf

# Launch template for EC2 instances
resource "aws_launch_template" "app" {
  name_prefix   = "app-"
  image_id      = data.aws_ami.amazon_linux.id
  instance_type = "t3.micro"

  user_data = base64encode(<<-EOF
              #!/bin/bash
              yum install -y httpd
              systemctl enable httpd
              systemctl start httpd
              echo "<h1>Hello from $(hostname)</h1>" > /var/www/html/index.html
              EOF
            )

  network_interfaces {
    associate_public_ip_address = false
    security_groups             = [aws_security_group.app_sg.id]
  }
}

# Auto scaling group
resource "aws_autoscaling_group" "app_asg" {
  name                      = "app-asg"
  min_size                  = 2
  max_size                  = 4
  desired_capacity          = 2
  vpc_zone_identifier       = aws_subnet.private[*].id
  launch_template {
    id      = aws_launch_template.app.id
    version = "$Latest"
  }

  tag {
    key                 = "Name"
    value               = "app-instance"
    propagate_at_launch = true
  }
}

# Data source for the latest Amazon Linux 2 AMI
data "aws_ami" "amazon_linux" {
  owners      = ["amazon"]
  most_recent = true
  filter {
    name   = "name"
    values = ["amzn2-ami-hvm-*-x86_64-gp2"]
  }
}

load_balancer.tf

resource "aws_lb" "app_lb" {
  name               = "app-lb"
  load_balancer_type = "application"
  subnets            = aws_subnet.public[*].id
  security_groups    = [aws_security_group.lb_sg.id]
}

resource "aws_lb_target_group" "app_tg" {
  name     = "app-tg"
  port     = 80
  protocol = "HTTP"
  vpc_id   = aws_vpc.main.id
  health_check {
    path                = "/"
    interval            = 30
    timeout             = 5
    unhealthy_threshold = 2
    healthy_threshold   = 2
  }
}

resource "aws_lb_listener" "app_listener" {
  load_balancer_arn = aws_lb.app_lb.arn
  port              = 80
  protocol          = "HTTP"

  default_action {
    type             = "forward"
    target_group_arn = aws_lb_target_group.app_tg.arn
  }
}

resource "aws_autoscaling_attachment" "asg_attachment" {
  autoscaling_group_name = aws_autoscaling_group.app_asg.id
  alb_target_group_arn   = aws_lb_target_group.app_tg.arn
}

6.3 Deployment steps

1. Install Terraform on your local machine or a CI runner.

This example demonstrates how a DevOps engineer can leverage IaC skills to design a robust cloud architecture. In a real‑world environment, you would add additional layers (bastion hosts, NAT gateways, private DNS, RDS instances, secrets management, logging and monitoring) and tune scaling policies based on business needs. The principles remain the same: design for resilience, security and cost‑effectiveness, automate everything and document your architecture.

Conclusion

Transitioning from DevOps engineer to cloud architect is a natural progression for professionals who enjoy problem‑solving and system design. DevOps provides a strong foundation in automation and CI/CD, but cloud architecture adds strategic planning, multi‑cloud knowledge, security and business alignment. By developing the technical and soft skills described above, obtaining relevant certifications and building a solid portfolio, you can position yourself for one of the most sought‑after roles in the IT industry. The journey requires continuous learning, but the rewards in terms of influence, compensation and job satisfaction are substantial.skillsoft.comzerotomastery.io