What Does a Cloud Engineer Do?
October 5, 2025
Core responsibilities, tooling, workflows, skills, and trends shaping the cloud engineering role.
Last Updated: October 2025
At a high level, cloud engineers build and maintain cloud infrastructure. This includes virtual networks/subnets, compute resources, storage, and anything else an application in the clouds needs. The role emerged as organizations moved from on-premise servers to public cloud platforms that demand automation and continuous improvement. Unlike a traditional system administrator who manages servers internally, cloud engineers manage the infrastructure that hosts the servers. They differ from software engineers by focusing on the plumbing that enables releases, and from cloud architects by owning day-to-day execution rather than only high-level strategy.
Core Responsibilities: What Cloud Engineers Own
Here's a brief overview of the core responsibilities of a cloud engineer:
- Provisioning infrastructure. Model compute, storage, networking, and managed services through infrastructure-as-code so environments are reproducible, auditable, and version-controlled.
- Automation and orchestration. Replace manual steps with pipelines, scripts, and bots that handle builds, deployments, configuration, and lifecycle tasks.
- Monitoring and observability. Instrument systems with metrics, logs, and traces to surface reliability risks and support a measurable error budget.
- Security and compliance. Embed policy-as-code, secrets management, and vulnerability scanning into delivery workflows to maintain a secure baseline.
- CI/CD stewardship. Design, maintain, and optimize release pipelines that keep features flowing from commit to production with minimal friction.
- Incident response. Lead investigations, coordinate stakeholders, and implement remediations when availability or performance dips.
Key Technologies and Tools: What You'll Use Daily
- Cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud as the foundational service providers, often used in hybrid or multi-cloud patterns.
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation/Azure Bicep, or Pulumi for declarative environment definitions.
- CI/CD platforms: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps to orchestrate builds, tests, and releases.
- Monitoring and logging: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Elastic Stack, Datadog, or cloud-native products like AWS CloudWatch for telemetry and alerting.
- Container ecosystem: Docker for containerization, Kubernetes for orchestration, and Helm/Argo CD to deploy automation.
Cloud Engineer vs. SysAdmin: How the Roles Differ
| Area | Cloud Engineer | SysAdmin |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Designing and automating cloud infrastructure and managed services | Operating systems, servers, and on-prem/VM infrastructure |
| Typical tools | Terraform/Pulumi, CloudFormation, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD | Active Directory/Group Policy, VMware/Hyper-V, SCCM/Intune, shell scripts |
| Deliverables | Reproducible IaC, deployment pipelines, available/scalable/reliable architecture | Uptime, patching, backups, user/device management |
| Metrics | Deployment frequency, MTTR, support tickets | Uptime, ticket SLAs, patch compliance, support tickets |
| Career paths | DevOps engineer, SRE, Cloud Architect | SysAdmin, IT Ops, Security Ops |
A Day in the Life: How Work Typically Flows
Most cloud engineering teams operate with an agile model. This means having daily or weekly standups (reviewing existing work items, incident follow-ups, and discussing upcoming changes), but outside of that, responsibilities differ greatly from team to team and person to person. Some cloud engineers work on a single project for months or years, others may deliver a different project every few weeks. Some engineers can have flexibility to design and build intricate systems, others might be responding to routine support tickets for provisioning new servers or updating infrastructure as code (IaC).
Cloud engineers usually work closely with other teams-- you can come into contact with anyone who's running code in the cloud. This is usually software engineers, but can also be data engineers or even other cloud engineers.
Example Projects: Stereotypical "Cloud Engineer" Projects You'll Do At Some Point
- Cloud migrations: Moving on-prem workloads to public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP. At some point, every Fortune 500 decides to move from capex to opex (look it up), and that means moving workloads from dedicated servers to cloud services.
- CI/CD modernization: Creating automated build and release pipelines. Sometimes you'll need to add test cases, sometimes you'll add security scans, sometimes you'll modernize with parallelization. There's no one-size-fits-all pipeline; your pipelines should cater to real business needs.
- Kubernetes platform build-outs and maintenance: Spinning up clusters, setting up networking, and monitoring performance. Setting up networking between pods and containers, figuring out why the cluster crashed, or kicking back and monitoring the cluster's health.
- Cost visibility programs: Instrumenting spend dashboards, anomaly alerts, and chargeback/showback. Downsizing overprovisioned resources, deleting unused resources, and automating resource cleanup. Tagging is key here.
Skills and Competencies: What Hiring Managers Screen For
- Scripting and automation: Cloud and DevOps engineers are responsible for automating tasks-- their own and other teams. This is done with a scripting language like Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
- Networking fundamentals: VPC design, networks, subnets, routing tables, DNS, load balancing, and firewalls in the cloud.
- Problem-solving mindset: Ability to reason about complex distributed systems, diagnosing failures, and design resilient mitigations. Understanding the development teams' needs and how to facilitate their success.
- Cross-team communication: Since DevOps teams work closely with other teams, soft skills and the ability to communicate clearly can be as important as engineering ability. If you don't know what a team is trying to accomplish, it's much harder to help them succeed!
Career Path and Roles: Where This Job Can Lead
The most common place for a cloud engineer to start is on the help desk, as a systems administrator, or in configuration management. Over time, as you get more comfortable with scripting and cloud services, your responsibilities can expand. Progression typically involves taking on more responsibility with existing projects, leading a team of more junior engineers, or working on a wider range of projects. Lateral moves into security engineering or cloud cost optimization are less common, but every organization is different. There's no substitute for practical hands-on experience and working your way up slowly, so don't try to skip to the end before you're ready.
Challenges in the Role: Common Tradeoffs to Navigate
- Speed versus security: Balancing rapid delivery with rigorous guardrails, especially in regulated industries.
- On-call sustainability: Managing burnout and knowledge transfer during 24/7 support rotations.
- Rapid vendor change: Keeping skills current as AWS, Azure, and GCP ship new managed services and deprecate old ones.
- Cost control: Preventing runaway spend from test environments, data egress, or misconfigured autoscaling policies.
Conclusion: Turn Infrastructure into Code and Keep Shipping
Cloud engineers build and maintain the infrastructure that runs your company's software. The career is not fixed: tools change, vendors shift, and practices evolve. That said, the core principles remain the same. Your goal is to run your company's software in the cloud efficiently. Turn infrastructure into code, keep it observable, and make sure teams can deliver without breaking what's already there.