Prove your cloud architecture skills
Architecture diagrams are easy to draw and hard to defend. Lemma records how you defend them: the trade-offs you make on resilience, security and cost when a practitioner pushes back.
What cloud architecture competence looks like
A good cloud architect designs for failure first. They know which component will break, what happens to users when it does, and how the system recovers. They choose regions, replication and backups based on what the business can tolerate, not on what sounds impressive in a diagram.
They also balance competing pressures. Managed services save effort but limit control. More redundancy costs more money. They write decisions down, so the next team understands why a queue sits between two services. They are comfortable saying 'it depends' and then explaining exactly what it depends on.
A live design review
60 min · Learning · with Omar K.
Omar K. rated the session
Practitioner · after the call
Clear reasoning on resilience and failover. Talked through trade-offs first.
Resilience and failover
Designing for component, zone and region failures with clear recovery targets and tested failover paths.
Scalability patterns
Horizontal scaling, caching, queues and partitioning applied where load actually demands them.
Security architecture
Network segmentation, identity boundaries and encryption designed into the system rather than bolted on.
Cost optimisation
Right-sizing, reserved capacity and architecture choices that keep the bill proportional to real usage.
Multi-cloud and hybrid
Knowing when portability is worth its complexity, and when committing to one provider is the better call.
Architecture decisions
Writing decision records that capture context, options and trade-offs for the people who come next.
What counts as evidence of cloud architecture skills?
Certificates in cloud architecture show an exam was passed. Lemma records how you work: sessions where you talked through a design or an incident, an adaptive test, and configuration in repositories you link. Every entry says where it came from. See the evidence methodology for how each source is weighed.
Cloud architecture
Mateo R. · SCI recomputed 9 Oct
Evidence · 4 entries
- Rated 5.0
A live design review
Live session · 9 Oct
- Verified
Infrastructure code and decision records
GitHub connector · 2 Oct
- Level 7.2
Scenario questions on trade-offs
Adaptive assessment · 24 Sep
- Taught · 1.5x
Teaching resilience patterns
Live session · 11 Sep
A live design review
In a session, you present or design a system while a practitioner challenges it: what fails, what it costs, how it scales. How well you defend and adapt the design is what they rate.
Infrastructure code and decision records
Attach a GitHub repository or commit with infrastructure code and architecture decision records. Lemma confirms the repo is linked to your account and re-checks access over time.
Scenario questions on trade-offs
The adaptive assessment presents realistic design situations, such as a region outage or a cost spike, and asks which change best fits. Harder levels follow strong answers.
Teaching resilience patterns
Teaching a session on failover, queues or caching strategies counts more than learning one. It shows you can explain architecture to people who must build and run it.
How is a cloud architecture skills test run on Lemma?
The cloud architecture test is adaptive, 15 to 25 questions on failure modes, permissions and cost rather than service names, and it stops once your level holds steady. With sessions and linked work it sets your cloud architecture SCI, where recent evidence carries more weight.
A single-region app was down for hours during a region outage. Which change fits best?
- ABigger instances
- BFailover to a second region with replicated data
- CA CDN in front of the API
- DMore alarms on availability
Defend a design live
Book a session with a cloud architecture practitioner and walk through a system you designed or one they set. They question resilience, security and cost, then rate the clarity of your trade-offs.
Connect your infrastructure work
Attach GitHub repositories with infrastructure code or decision records. Reviewers see that your designs were built and documented, not only sketched on a whiteboard.
Take the adaptive assessment
Scenario questions cover resilience, scaling, security and cost. Difficulty adjusts after each answer, and timed questions with no going back keep the result honest.
Cloud architecture skills: common questions
How do I prove cloud architecture experience for a senior role?
What happens in a cloud architecture design review session?
Is cloud architecture different from system design on Lemma?
Do I need a cloud architect certification to be credible?
Skills related to cloud architecture
Browse the skills directoryAWS
Evidence that you can design, secure and run workloads on AWS, not just name services.
Evidence for AWSSystem design
Show how you reason about scale, failure and trade-offs, in live design sessions reviewed by practitioners.
Evidence for system designDevOps
Evidence of how you build pipelines, ship safely and keep systems observable.
Evidence for DevOpsCybersecurity
Evidence of how you find, prioritise and fix real security risks in systems and code.
Evidence for cybersecurity
Start your cloud architecture evidence record.
Lemma is in early access. Request an invite and we will email you when your place is ready.