What is the job of a system architect?

Question

Career in IT

Hello.
I watched a lecture from Mail.ru on the work of a system architect. I got the idea that this is a person who performs the duties of a product manager and technical director. I didn’t understand a little, what then is its uniqueness and necessity?

Answer 1

At the project planning stage, the system architect, based on assumptions about the number of users and their activity, makes predictions about which database to choose, how to organize a cluster, what hardware and how much you need, what type of scaling to choose - vertical, horizontal, what place in the system is likely to become narrow in the first place, which second (the system will run into a limit on the processor or RAM or hard disk) whether it is necessary to separate the server into a database and a file one.
Depending on the size of the company, he can design both network infrastructure and local tasks. In small companies, such people usually combine the position with either a database architect or a system administrator (depending on which system design has the most impact on business processes).
You can see the classic definition.
In general, the position is in demand starting from a certain size of the company.
His uniqueness lies in his experience, he has already built N large systems on several technologies and is well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.
It often works even without a system architect, and sometimes it doesn't work and things like this happen. How to deal with the limit of 1000 LDAP entries? or suchIs it possible in MySQL to create an index for an ORDER BY by condition?

Answer 2

He comes up with the architecture of the application, a large application, if you have worked with small ones it is difficult to understand