It sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because (like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every time.
> I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.
Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well.
> I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default.
Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it / in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X, well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I probably would ;))
Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague
throwawaymyjob who is our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.
> I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.
Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well.
> I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default.
Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it / in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X, well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I probably would ;))
Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague throwawaymyjob who is our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.