Hey guys,

I graduate soon and I am hoping to work in cloud engineering and or cloud security roles in the future. I know that is unrealistic out of school, I am hoping to work in a security role or even IAM role if possible. What would be the best path to go down to land a role that gets me closer to cloud sec? Certs? Projects?

Any advice is appreciated.

Resume: [

NAME REDACTED]

[Location Redacted] | [Email Redacted] | [Phone Redacted] | [LinkedIn] | [GitHub]

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

International Law Firm
Network Operations / Security Operations Intern
June 2026 – Present

• Monitored and investigated security alerts in IBM QRadar and CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, using OTX/X-Force threat intelligence, OSINT, and log analysis to investigate large outbound transfers, malicious IPs, and impossible-travel events.
• Analyzed Duo MFA authentication logs to triage identity-related security alerts and investigate suspicious authentication activity.
• Investigated phishing and email threats using Proofpoint, Abnormal AI, and Proofpoint Threat Response; analyzed email headers, decoded suspicious URLs, evaluated links using OSINT, and blocked malicious senders.
• Provisioned Windows servers across four global sites and administered Active Directory, including OU placement, least-privilege security groups, and PowerShell-based user lifecycle management.
• Managed hybrid Exchange and Microsoft 365 mailbox access, remediated vulnerabilities identified through Qualys, and supported a VMware-to-Hyper-V migration.

Government Agency
Help Desk Technician Intern
September 2025 – June 2026

• Resolved 50+ weekly ServiceNow tickets supporting 250 users across Windows endpoints, operating systems, VPN connectivity, and network access; documented troubleshooting and remediation.
• Supported user onboarding and offboarding through Active Directory provisioning, MFA enrollment, access reviews, and standardized asset tracking.

Healthcare Organization
IT Security Intern
February 2025 – August 2025

• Triaged phishing incidents using Mimecast, investigated high-risk accounts using CrowdStrike Falcon and Zscaler, and documented indicators of compromise (IOCs) and incident findings incorporated into team playbooks.

PROJECTS

Hybrid Identity & Security Homelab
Proxmox, Microsoft Entra ID, Wazuh | 2026

• Built a private Proxmox homelab and separate Azure workload; automated Active Directory user management and AGDLP-secured SMB shares using PowerShell and provisioned infrastructure with Terraform.
• Scoped Entra Connect synchronization to lab identities and published an internal Nginx application through Microsoft Entra Application Proxy using group assignments, Conditional Access, and MFA without exposing inbound ports.
• Centralized security telemetry from five Windows and Linux agents in Wazuh; tested custom detections for Active Directory changes, ADSync service interruptions, repeated SMB authentication failures, and sudo activity. Isolated Kali testing on a no-route network bridge.

Infrastructure CI/CD Pipeline
Terraform, GitHub Actions, Azure | 2026

• Built GitHub Actions CI workflows for Azure and Proxmox Terraform configurations, automatically running formatting, backend-free initialization, and validation checks on pull requests and main-branch changes.
• Provisioned Azure infrastructure using Terraform, including a virtual network, network security group, public IP, Linux virtual machine, Key Vault, and Storage Account; configured managed identity and least-privilege Key Vault RBAC.

CERTIFICATIONS

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)
• Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate (SC-300)
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
• CompTIA Security+
• CompTIA Network+

EDUCATION

[College Name Redacted]
Bachelor of Science in Information Technology
Expected Graduation: May 2027
GPA: 3.97 | Dean's List: 2024–2026

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Infrastructure & Automation: Terraform, Bicep, GitHub Actions, PowerShell, Bash, Python, Proxmox, VMware, Hyper-V

Identity & Cloud: Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Entra Connect, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Azure RBAC, Azure Policy, Key Vault

Security & Operations: IBM QRadar, CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Sentinel, Wazuh, Proofpoint, Proofpoint Threat Response, Abnormal AI, Mimecast, Qualys, Zscaler, Duo MFA, KQL, ServiceNow

Networking: DNS, DHCP, VPN, Azure VNets, VNet Peering, NSGs, UDRs, Network Virtual Appliances, Wireshark, Samba

Full disclosure: I made this video. I run a small channel of animated explainers about the business side of tech, and this one is a 5-minute history of AWS.

I hope it’s OK to share here. Mods, please remove it if not.

A few things that surprised me while researching it (all from primary sources: Amazon’s 10-Ks, the original 2006 BusinessWeek story, and Jassy’s and Bezos’s own accounts):

• The people who built AWS say the spare-capacity story is a myth. It started because Amazon’s own engineers kept rebuilding the same storage, servers and databases.
• EC2 was built in Cape Town because the engineer leading it wanted to go home.
• As Amazon now counts it, AWS made $458M of operating profit in 2014. All of Amazon made $178M.

Video (5:25): https://youtu.be/u3QmplqlGRs

Would really appreciate your thoughts on it. This sub knows the subject far better than most, so honest feedback is very welcome. Thanks all.

Hey everyone!

I have an upcoming interview with Snowflake for the Cloud Support Engineer – Application Security . My initial interview is scheduled with the Hiring Manager.

I'm trying to understand the interview process and prepare in the right direction.

For anyone who has interviewed with Snowflake for a Cloud Support Engineer, Application Security, or a similar support/security role, I'd really appreciate your insights.

1. How many interview rounds were there in your experience?
2. What topics should I focus on for the technical rounds?
3. Do they ask questions on IAM, SSO, SAML, OAuth 2.0, SCIM, MFA, and database authentication?
4. How much emphasis is placed on troubleshooting scenarios, incident management, and Root Cause Analysis (RCA)?
5. Should I expect questions on Snowflake architecture, SQL, AWS, Linux, networking, and security?
6. What should I expect during the initial Hiring Manager screening?

I've already started preparing authentication and authorization protocols, IAM concepts, Snowflake fundamentals, and troubleshooting scenarios. I want to make sure I'm focusing on the right areas rather than studying everything randomly.

If you've recently interviewed for a similar role, could you please share your experience and any preparation tips? Even a general idea of the interview structure would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in advance! I really appreciate any guidance

As a CSE , should i take up a job in cloud sales and then hope i will transition to a more technical side or wait for roles in Cloud technical?

Have some courses I’m considering taking to learn cloud engineering using Python, Java, and Golang however I would like to build out my ideas in full without having to outsource aspects of development.

Would you have 2 minutes to answer a few questions?

1. Roughly how much do you spend on the cloud per month?

2. Who is responsible for monitoring this bill?

3. When was the last time the bill came as a surprise? What did you do?

4. Have you ever tried using a tool to reduce these costs?

I'm doing a project on cloud storage management, and I'm exploring an idea to reduce the amount of space files use without changing their contents.

The idea is to store uploads using fast compression first, then let the system recompress them in the background using a higher compression level when it can save a worthwhile amount of space in cloud . i am using aws s3 for storage . Since this runs on cloud storage, it would need to limit CPU usage and avoid slowing down regular uploads and downloads.

what more features can i add to this project? maybe like bluetooth transfer or smth else . im confused , i could use your help .

Been running inference for a small side project for about 8 months. Traffic went from “basically nobody” to “enough to care about latency” sometime in June, so I started looking at the GPU bill more seriously.
First instinct was to chase the cheapest hourly rate i could find. Marketplace instances looked unbeatable on paper, like $0.40 per hour for stuff that was listed at $1.50-2 elsewhere. I was pretty smug about it for about three weeks.

Then I sat down with the card statement and the logs.

Stuff I hadn’t been counting: batch jobs that crashed halfway and had to be restarted (three times in one week), the 20-25 minutes I spent reinstalling drivers and pulling the model and wiring vllm up every time I spun a new instance, forgetting to kill one over a weekend that cost me about $30 for literally nothing, and having to redownload the base model from HF repeatedly because i wasn’t paying for persistent storage.
Did the math. The “cheap” option was actually costing me around 2.3x what I thought. The hourly rate was just one number. The real bill factored in every restart, every re-setup, every weekend oops.
Ended up moving the production inference to a GMI Cloud H100 where I kept a persistent volume between restarts. My per-finished-job cost dropped a lot once I stopped paying what i started calling the restart tax.
Still use the marketplace stuff for one-off dev work where crashing doesn’t cost me anything. But production needed an environment that could survive a stop/start cycle, not just a low number on a pricing page.
Checked the numbers again at month 7 to make sure i wasn’t rationalizing. The boring setup was still cheaper per finished job. Not a glamorous conclusion.

Looking for a vultr dev to run servers for me

I put it on an EC2 instance and read CloudTrail straight out of S3 — no Glue crawler, no Athena workgroup. A throwaway account with 118 events in it was enough to prove the detection query I had already written was wrong — and to convince me this is worth building out properly