Cloud Engineer

The journey

1. Practised under observation

   1. 01The machine beneath the cloudCloud resources are still computers: the operating system, the shell, and the automation literacy every cloud decision rests on.Practised under observation

      MilestoneOwns the host

      A service that has stopped is diagnosed from its logs and its processes rather than restarted hopefully, storage you added survives a reboot, and an unfamiliar host can be read for its health without anyone briefing you first.

2. From here, milestones are verified rather than practised.

   Verified against a real task

   1. 02Cloud models, primitives and the first estateWhat the cloud actually is: the service models, the responsibility split, the global topology, and the core primitive set built by hand once before it is ever automated.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneBuilds the estate by hand, once

      The line between what the provider secures and what you secure is drawn for every component you built, and the data is unreachable from the internet because you checked rather than because you assumed.

   2. 03Infrastructure as code at estate scaleThe estate rebuilt as code, with declarative provisioning at professional depth, state managed safely, and modules that scale to an organisation.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneThe estate, as code, at scale

      Every resource in this account exists because code said so, and the record of what exists is treated as the dangerous thing it is.

   3. 04Cloud identity, security posture and governanceThe estate defended and governed: identity as the perimeter, exposure minimised, guardrails automated, and the account structure that keeps a mistake small.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneDefended, governed, and provably so

      Nothing here is reachable with a key that never expires, and a mistake in one part of this estate stops before it reaches the rest.

   4. 05Compute, containers and managed servicesChoosing what runs the workload, with the compute spectrum from instances to serverless and managed services adopted with their trade-offs named.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneThe right runtime, defended

      Each workload runs on the model you can defend against the two you rejected, capacity arrives and leaves on a signal you chose, and the limits of the convenient option are stated rather than glossed.

   5. 06Resilience, cost and performance engineeringThe estate that survives and the bill that makes sense, with availability designed and tested, recovery objectives proven, and cost engineered rather than discovered.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneSurvives, restores, and justifies its bill

      A lost zone degrades this system rather than ending it, and the cost of running it was a design input instead of a month-end surprise.

   6. 07Migration, hybrid and multi-cloud realityMost cloud work is not greenfield: existing systems moved without breaking them, hybrid connectivity engineered honestly, and the multi-cloud question answered like an engineer instead of a slogan.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneMoved it without breaking it

      The dependency nobody documented is found before the move rather than during it, the way back is still open at the moment of switching, and what would be genuinely hard to leave is written down instead of waved away.

   7. 08The Cloud Engineer in the organizationThe estate as a service to a business, with architecture defended to non-engineers, spend owned alongside finance, and an estate that outlives its author.Verified against a real task

      MilestoneThe estate as a service to the business

      Somebody who does not build systems can say what this one costs and what it deliberately does not do, and a stranger could run it if you left tomorrow.

3. 1. Capstone

      An estate a business runs on

      A complete production cloud estate for a realistic organisation, proposed by you and approved by an instructor, built under observation, from the network and account topology through infrastructure as code, identity and posture, compute and data, resilience and cost to a real migration and the organisational layer of the seat.

      Defence

      You walk an instructor through your own estate: what is in this account that is not in the code and why that is acceptable, where the shared-responsibility line sits for each component, what survives when a zone is lost and what does not, and what it costs monthly with the two drivers behind it. The credential is not awarded if you cannot account for your own work.

   2. Credential

      High-assurance credential

      Evidence that you can design an estate that survives a failure, refuses an attacker, and can be rebuilt from code by somebody who has never met you. It does not claim seniority, and it does not oblige any employer to accept it.

      See how proof works