Junior Platform Engineer

Technical Assessment
Bud Systems · 2026

A short, friendly assessment to get a sense of your technical foundations. No trick questions — just answer as best you can.

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Progress0 of 15 answered

Section 1 — Cloud & Azure

Q1–6

Question 01

Azure App Service is described as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering. What does this mean in practice compared to using a Virtual Machine (IaaS)?

PaaS is always cheaper than IaaS regardless of workload

With PaaS, Microsoft manages the underlying OS and runtime, so you only need to manage your application and its configuration

PaaS gives you full root access to the server so you can install any software you need

PaaS services run on your own on-premises hardware rather than in Microsoft's data centres

Question 02

A deployed Azure Web App is intermittently returning 500 errors but the app appears healthy in the Azure portal. Which Azure tool would give you the most useful information about what is failing at runtime?

Azure Cost Management

Azure Active Directory

Azure Application Insights — it captures live telemetry, exceptions, and request traces

Azure Blob Storage

Question 03

Your team is deploying a new microservice to Azure. You need to ensure that when the environment is torn down, all related resources (App Service, SQL database, storage account) are deleted together. What is the best way to organise this in Azure?

Place all resources in the same Azure Resource Group so they share a lifecycle and can be deleted as a unit

Tag each resource with the same name so they are easier to find in the portal

Create a separate Azure subscription for each environment

Store a list of resource names in a spreadsheet and delete them one at a time

Question 04

What is the difference between "scaling out" (horizontal scaling) and "scaling up" (vertical scaling) in Azure?

Scaling out means upgrading to a larger VM; scaling up means adding more VMs of the same size

They mean the same thing — both increase the capacity of an existing server

Scaling out adds more instances to share the load; scaling up increases the CPU and RAM of a single instance

Scaling out means moving to a different Azure region; scaling up means adding more storage

Question 05

Your application needs to store a database connection string and an API key securely, so they can be accessed at runtime without being hardcoded in the source code. Which Azure service is designed for this?

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Key Vault

Azure Active Directory

Azure Service Bus

Question 06

Azure Functions is described as a "serverless" compute service. What does serverless mean in this context?

The application runs with no code at all — configuration replaces programming entirely

The application is hosted on physical servers that the developer purchases and manages

Functions only run on a fixed schedule and cannot respond to events

You write small units of code that run in response to events (such as an HTTP request or a queue message), without provisioning or managing any servers yourself

Section 2 — CI/CD & Pipelines

Q7–9

Question 07

In an Azure DevOps pipeline, what is a trigger?

A manual approval step that pauses the pipeline before it deploys to production

A notification sent to the development team when a build fails

A script that rolls back a failed deployment automatically

A condition that automatically starts the pipeline — for example, when code is pushed to a specific branch

Question 08

Your team deploys to three environments: dev, staging, and production. A bug is found in staging that was not caught in dev. What does this most likely indicate about your pipeline?

The dev environment or its tests do not closely enough replicate staging conditions — the test coverage or environment parity needs improving

Staging should be skipped in future to save time

Bugs in staging are normal and should be pushed to production anyway

The pipeline is working correctly — bugs are expected at every stage

Question 09

In a CI/CD pipeline, what is a build artefact?

The compiled, packaged output of the build stage — the file(s) that are actually deployed to an environment

A log file generated when the pipeline fails

The YAML file that defines the pipeline configuration

A backup copy of the source code repository

Section 3 — Networking Basics

Q10–11

Question 10

You need to point app.bud.co.uk at an Azure-provided hostname (myapp.azurewebsites.net) rather than a fixed IP address. Which DNS record type should you use?

A record — maps a domain to an IPv4 address

MX record — directs email to the correct mail server

CNAME record — creates an alias from one domain name to another hostname

TXT record — stores arbitrary text for verification purposes

Question 11

A new Azure VM is deployed but you cannot connect to it via SSH. The VM is running and has a public IP. What is the most likely cause?

The VM's operating system has not finished installing

Azure does not support SSH connections to virtual machines

The VM needs to be restarted before any connections are accepted

The Network Security Group (NSG) does not have an inbound rule allowing TCP traffic on port 22

Section 4 — Your Thinking

Q12–15

Question 12

In your own words, what do you think "Infrastructure as Code" means? Don't worry if you haven't used it — just have a go at explaining it.

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Question 13

A website you look after goes down at 2am. Walk us through how you would approach investigating the problem. There is no single right answer — we are interested in how you think.

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Question 14

What interests you most about platform or cloud engineering? Is there a project (personal or professional) that sparked that interest?

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Question 15

If you had to learn a new tool or technology from scratch on the job, how would you go about it? Give a specific example if you can.

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Questions 12–15 are open answers for the hiring team to review. There are no right or wrong answers to these.

Technical AssessmentBud Systems · 2026

Section 1 — Cloud & Azure

Section 2 — CI/CD & Pipelines

Section 3 — Networking Basics

Section 4 — Your Thinking

Assessment complete

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Technical Assessment
Bud Systems · 2026