Professional Standards & Competencies Flashcards

A cloud engineer suspects a vendor's managed service has a backdoor intentionally inserted by the vendor. The BEST immediate step is:

Answer: Report the suspicion to internal security and consider migrating workloads off the service

Suspected supply-chain backdoors require immediate internal escalation and risk mitigation before any public disclosure.

Under the shared responsibility model in public cloud, which security area is ALWAYS the customer's responsibility regardless of service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)?

Answer: Data classification and identity management

Regardless of service model, the customer always owns data classification and identity/access management decisions.

A cloud engineer discovers that a recently deployed Terraform module introduces a privilege escalation vulnerability. What is the CORRECT order of actions?

Answer: Document, notify security, patch in a branch, test, deploy, post-mortem

Privilege escalation vulnerabilities require security notification and tested remediation before deployment to avoid introducing new issues.

Which ethical obligation does a cloud engineer have when they leave an employer and join a competitor?

Answer: Avoid using or disclosing former employer's proprietary configurations and trade secrets

Non-disclosure obligations typically survive employment termination; sharing proprietary configurations constitutes a breach of duty and trade secret law.

A cloud engineer notices their team consistently underestimates migration timelines, leading to budget overruns. The MOST professional way to address this is:

Answer: Conduct a retrospective, identify estimation biases, and introduce structured planning techniques like three-point estimation

Structured retrospectives and formal estimation techniques reduce systematic bias and improve forecast accuracy over time.

When a cloud engineer is asked to provide a cost estimate to a client, professional standards require that the estimate:

Answer: Include assumptions, confidence intervals, and known unknowns clearly documented

Professional estimates must be transparent about assumptions and uncertainty so clients can make informed decisions.

A junior engineer on your team writes overly complex Terraform code with no comments. As a senior cloud engineer, the BEST professional response is:

Answer: Provide constructive feedback, suggest simplification, and explain readability standards in a code review

Constructive code review feedback builds team competency and establishes maintainable standards without undermining the junior engineer.