Cloud Engineer Quality Control & Assurance 5

Question 1

Which practice ensures that secrets and credentials are never hardcoded in application source code, supporting cloud security QA?

Accepted Answer

Using a secrets manager such as AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault

Answer

Secrets managers store, rotate, and audit access to credentials at runtime, keeping them out of source code entirely.

Question 2

A cloud QA engineer wants to validate Terraform changes without applying them. Which command provides a plan for review?

Accepted Answer

terraform plan

Answer

`terraform plan` generates an execution plan showing what changes Terraform will make without modifying any resources.

Question 3

What is the purpose of 'observability' as a quality assurance principle in cloud systems?

Accepted Answer

To understand internal system state from external outputs like logs, metrics, and traces

Answer

Observability enables engineers to diagnose and understand system behavior in production using the three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces.

Question 4

Which CI/CD quality practice involves running security vulnerability scans on container images before deployment?

Accepted Answer

Container image scanning with tools like Trivy or Snyk

Answer

Container image scanning tools like Trivy detect known CVEs in OS packages and application dependencies before images reach production.

Question 5

A cloud team implements automated rollback when a deployment causes error rate to exceed 5%. What type of quality control does this represent?

Accepted Answer

Automated remediation based on observability signals

Answer

Automated rollback triggered by error rate thresholds is a self-healing quality control mechanism driven by real-time observability data.

Cloud Engineer Practice Test