ExamopotamiaWhy test cloud skills before you hire?
Cloud platforms make it easy to start resources and just as easy to misconfigure them. Many candidates have clicked through a console or passed a foundational certificate; fewer understand who patches what, how to keep secrets out of code, or what to do when data is exposed. A vendor-neutral fundamentals test gives you a fair comparison between applicants from different cloud backgrounds.
What this template covers
- Service models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and serverless, and what the provider manages in each.
- Shared responsibility: where the provider's duties end and yours begin.
- Identity and secrets: least privilege and managed secrets stores.
- Resilience and scaling: availability zones, scaling up versus out, and object storage.
- Operations: Infrastructure as Code, cost control and responding to a public bucket.
How to run it well
Twelve questions in 12 to 15 minutes makes a good screen. Common AWS and Azure names appear only as examples, so candidates from either background can answer. Set a pass mark of 65% for support and junior cloud roles and 75% for cloud engineers, DevOps engineers and solutions architects.
Shuffle questions and options. The template is mainly single-choice with a select-all question on cost and a true/false on permissions. Look closely at the secrets and public bucket answers in the results. Those reflect security habits that matter on day one, before someone has learnt your own platform.
Who this test is for
Use it for junior cloud engineers, DevOps and platform engineers, system administrators moving to the cloud, cloud support roles and technical pre-sales staff. It also works as a baseline for developers who are about to get production cloud access. Organisations starting a cloud migration can also use it to check in-house infrastructure staff before training, so the budget goes to the gaps that really exist. It is a good check for managed service providers placing engineers on several client accounts too.
Make it yours
If you run on one provider, add questions on its specific services, networking and identity model, or on Kubernetes, CI/CD and monitoring tools you use. Write a scenario from a real incident with details changed. You can ask the AI generator for further questions on topics like networking or disaster recovery and review them before use. If you use more than one provider, you can keep the neutral questions as a shared core and attach a short provider-specific section for each team.