Ask four people on Gapps' Google Cloud team what a cloud architect does, and you get four different answers, because right now one of them is deep in AI tooling for one customer, one spends 90% of his week embedded inside someone else's development team, and one is building infrastructure from scratch for a company that had nothing in the cloud five years ago.
The team behind those answers:
Eight months to nearly ten years, on the same team, in the same 30-minute daily standup, even though everyone is usually deep in a different customer's problem. That standup is where blockers surface and help gets offered, and beyond it, things stay informal: if a project needs more hands, someone asks, and someone shows up.
Same team, same daily standup, four genuinely different jobs.
"The job depends so much on the customer and what they need," says Jarno. "It could be AI tooling; it could be building an entire GCP infrastructure. We're basically helping customers get where they want to go, and how we get there is up to them."
That plays out differently for each of them right now. Eelis has spent about the last 10 months on AI-related work for one customer. Henri spends most of his time as a cloud engineer inside a customer's development team, doing hands-on build work rather than the security consulting most of the team does. Alejandro has spent this whole year on GCP development for a single customer.
"At a lot of consulting companies, an architect designs something and stops there. Someone else builds it," Eelis says. "Here, at Gapps, if you design it, you build it too, and all of it happens in code. You need to be technical."
It sounds like a small operational detail, but it's the line Eelis draws between Gapps and most of the industry he's watched from the outside.
"A good colleague should think like a trusted advisor," Alejandro says. "We're not trying to squeeze the client. We're trying to give them the best value."
Jarno, still the newest voice on the team, points to what's harder to see from the outside.
"In a lot of consultancies, there's a wall between you and management. Here, everyone's approachable, even the CEO, Vesa Sironen, and if something's actually blocking you, it gets removed fast."
None of the four call themselves AI engineers, and yet all four use AI every day, just to varying degrees and in different ways.
For Eelis, AI changed what building looks like day to day.
"I don't build much myself anymore," he says. "It's prompting, looking at the output, and correcting what I want done differently."
He now runs his tasks through one connected tool instead of updating a ticketing system, GitHub, and documentation separately, and, Jarno adds, work that used to take a month now takes about a week.
Alejandro sees the shift from a different angle.
"You're usually good in one area, and the basics carry over everywhere else. AI makes it a lot easier to fill the gaps- the exact syntax, the details you haven't memorized- and that makes me bolder about tackling things I've never done before."
Henri is more matter-of-fact about where he stands:
"Honestly, I'm not that good at using AI tools yet. For me it's mostly a search engine replacement. I don't Google anything anymore; I just ask Gemini."
Being hands-on with AI still comes with a catch, Jarno points out: you're the one who has to stand behind the decision, so you need to actually know what you're doing.
Alejandro's first project at Gapps was building a system from scratch with a small team in about a month, and it's still running years later, right at the core of that customer's business.
"We built a really good relationship with that team, and we still have it," he says.
Eelis started building an insurance customer's Google Cloud environment from nothing five years ago. Today, almost all of their infrastructure runs on Google Cloud, except for their core insurance system itself, a large and genuinely important piece of the business that licensing rules won't let them move yet.
"It looks like a long way to go at the start. You just keep building, and eventually you get there."
Henri has his own version of that arc: a 3-year project he joined before a single line of code existed, plus a FinOps engagement where the customer's savings were immediate and visible.
"That was nice to actually see happen."
Alejandro likes that Google Cloud, for the most part, just works, and that when a bug turns out to be real instead of his own mistake, Google actually helps fix it.
"Most of the time the error is on me. When it's not, you're not stuck on your own."
Henri calls cloud architecture a job that never really stops teaching you something, since no two environments look alike, and he's quick to add that this probably isn't unique to Google Cloud so much as true of IT work in general.
Eelis, ten years in at Gapps, puts it down to something simpler: pride.
"If I did sloppy work, I wouldn't want to do it at all, and you'd hear about it in the dailies anyway. Everyone's responsible for the team, and the team's responsible for everyone."
If you're trying to picture what "cloud architect" actually means at Gapps, this is closer to the real answer than any job description: four different jobs, four different tenures, tied together by one daily standup and a shared refusal to design something they wouldn't also build.