Free Cloud Architect Practice Assessment (2026)

Cohesyve · Practice for candidates

Going for a Cloud Architect role? Find out how you'd actually score.

Run a Cloud Architect simulation built the same way employers build theirs, and get a full report showing exactly where you lost marks — before it counts.

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Overview

Cloud architect assessments are almost never a certification quiz. You are handed a workload, a set of constraints — budget, latency, compliance, an existing estate you cannot rewrite — and asked to produce a design and defend it. The scoring rewards the trade-offs you name out loud far more than the services you pick. This page covers what those exercises contain, how they are marked, and how to prepare for one.

Why employers assess this role

A cloud design decision is expensive to reverse once workloads and data are sitting on it, so employers want evidence of judgement before they hire rather than after the first migration. Certifications prove recall of service names but say almost nothing about whether someone can size an environment to a real budget or spot a single point of failure in a diagram.

What gets tested

Reference architecture design and service selectionHigh availability and disaster recovery planningCost modelling and rightsizingNetwork topology, segmentation and connectivityIdentity, access and least-privilege designInfrastructure as code and repeatable provisioningMigration sequencing and cutover planningExplaining trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders

The format

Duration

60–120 minutes

Question types

Design a target architecture from a written brief
Review and critique an existing architecture diagram
Cost and rightsizing exercise against a stated budget
Written reasoning on trade-offs and migration sequencing

Levels

Entry · Mid · Senior

What you'll be asked to do

Design a target architecture

The core exercise. You get a workload description with constraints that conflict slightly, and you produce a design. Assessors look at whether the constraints actually drove the design or were acknowledged and then ignored.

•Design a multi-region deployment for a workload with a four-hour recovery time objective
•Architect a data platform where customer records must remain inside one jurisdiction
•Design the landing zone for an organisation moving its first three applications to cloud

Critique an existing design

You are shown a diagram or a description of a running estate and asked what is wrong with it. This section separates people who can build from people who can also review.

•Identify the single points of failure in a provided three-tier architecture
•Find the security weaknesses in a network diagram with public subnets and flat routing
•Explain why a design will not meet its stated recovery point objective

Model and control cost

Given a workload and a monthly budget, produce a defensible estimate and adjust the design to fit. Rough arithmetic is accepted; hand-waving is not.

•Rightsize an over-provisioned compute fleet with a stated utilisation profile
•Choose between on-demand, reserved and spot capacity for a batch workload and justify it
•Reduce the cost of a storage tier without breaching a retention requirement

Plan the migration

Design is only half the exercise. You are asked how the organisation gets from where it is to what you drew, without an outage nobody agreed to.

•Sequence the migration of an application with a database that cannot be down for more than an hour
•Define the rollback plan for a cutover that fails at the halfway point
•Decide what gets rehosted, what gets replatformed, and what gets left alone

Cohesyve for candidates

Practise a Cloud Architect assessment before the real one

Run the same AI job simulations companies use to evaluate applicants. You get a scored report showing where you're strong and where you're not, plus what to work on.

Sample tasks — and what strong looks like

Design a highly available architecture for a customer-facing web application with a stated recovery time objective of one hour and a recovery point objective of five minutes.

Mid

What strong looks like: The design is driven by those two numbers — replication mode, failover mechanism and data durability are each traced back to the objective they satisfy, and the candidate says what the design would look like if the numbers were relaxed. Weak submissions draw a generic multi-availability-zone diagram and never mention the objectives again after the opening paragraph.

Here is a monthly cloud bill broken down by service. Identify the largest sources of waste and propose changes.

Entry

What strong looks like: Starts from the largest line items rather than the easiest ones, distinguishes idle resources from over-provisioned ones, considers commitment discounts against workload predictability, and states the risk each change introduces. Weak answers propose shutting things down at night without checking whether the workload is batch or customer-facing.

An organisation wants to move a monolithic on-premises application to cloud in six months. Produce the migration plan.

Senior

What strong looks like: Sequences the move so dependencies land before the things that need them, keeps a working rollback at every stage, handles the data migration and the cutover window explicitly, and names what will deliberately not change in the first phase. Weak plans describe an ideal end state with no path to it.

Design the network and identity model for a company with three business units that must not be able to reach each other's environments.

Senior

What strong looks like: Separation is enforced at the account or subscription boundary rather than only by network rules, permissions are role-based and scoped to the unit, and the candidate says how shared services such as logging or DNS are handled without reopening the boundary. Weak answers rely on security group rules inside one flat network.

How to prepare

#1
Practise designing to explicit numbers — put a recovery objective, a latency target and a budget on every practice brief, because assessments always carry constraints and candidates routinely design as though they do not.
#2
Rehearse drawing an architecture quickly and legibly, since a large share of the marks depend on an assessor being able to read your diagram without narration.
#3
Learn to estimate cost roughly from first principles rather than reaching for a pricing calculator, because most timed assessments do not give you one.
#4
Work through failure scenarios on your own designs: pull out a region, a database, a dependency, and write down what breaks and how long recovery takes.
#5
Practise stating the trade-off explicitly in one sentence — what you gained, what you gave up, and what would change your mind — as this is where senior candidates separate themselves.
#6
Run at least one full timed attempt from brief to finished design, because pacing across design, cost and migration sections is where competent architects most often run out of time.

Common mistakes

Producing a technically elegant design that ignores the budget or compliance constraint stated in the brief.
Naming managed services without explaining why they were chosen over the alternatives.
Designing for imagined future scale rather than the load actually described.
Leaving identity and access as an afterthought at the end of the document.
Presenting a target state with no migration path, cutover plan or rollback.
Drawing a diagram so dense or unlabelled that the assessor cannot follow the data flow.

How it's scored

Criterion	What strong looks like
Fit to the stated constraints	Every significant decision traces back to a requirement in the brief, and where a constraint could not be met the candidate says so and explains the compromise.
Resilience and failure thinking	Single points of failure are identified and either removed or accepted deliberately, with recovery time and data loss quantified rather than described as minimal.
Cost awareness	A defensible estimate with visible assumptions, and a design that changes when the budget changes rather than staying fixed.
Security and access design	Least privilege, clear trust boundaries, encryption decisions stated, and separation enforced at a boundary that a misconfiguration cannot casually cross.
Communication	A diagram and a short written rationale that a delivery team could act on, and that a non-technical stakeholder could follow at a high level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be assessed on a specific cloud provider?

Usually the employer names the platform they run, and the exercise is set in it. Many assessments are deliberately provider-neutral and score the underlying design, which is why patterns travel better across roles than memorised service names.

Will I be asked to write infrastructure as code?

Sometimes a small amount, more often at mid level than senior. Where it appears it is usually a short module or template rather than a full environment, and it is scored on structure and reuse rather than provider syntax you could look up.

How detailed should my diagram be?

Detailed enough that data flow, trust boundaries and failure domains are unambiguous, and no more. Assessors mark clarity, so an unlabelled diagram with forty icons scores worse than a clean one with twelve.

Are certifications enough to pass these assessments?

They help with vocabulary and service coverage but rarely with the scoring itself, because the marks sit in trade-off reasoning, cost modelling and migration sequencing — none of which certification exams test in an open-ended form.

How can I practise a design exercise before a real one?

Sit a scored simulation rather than reading more reference architectures. Cohesyve includes five free assessments a month with a full report, so you can see which criteria your designs actually lose marks against before an employer is the one marking them.

Practise another role

Cohesyve · Practice for candidates

Practise a Cloud Architect assessment now — free.

Five scored assessments a month, a full report on every run, and a learning pathway built from what you got wrong. No card required.