Cloud Engineer

One free single-file download (Terraform). No account, no cloud provider, no credit card, and nothing here can cost you money — you will be creating files on your own disk, not servers. Delete the binary afterwards if you like.

1. 1

   Get the tool

   Download Terraform from terraform.io — it is a single executable. Put it somewhere on your PATH, or just work in the folder you downloaded it to. Check it runs.

   Any

   terraform -version

2. 2

   Describe something that does not exist yet

   Make a new empty folder and create a file called main.tf. You are not writing instructions here — you are describing a desired end state, and that distinction is the whole idea.

   Any

   terraform {
     required_providers {
       local = { source = "hashicorp/local" }
     }
   }
   
   resource "local_file" "hello" {
     filename = "${path.module}/out/hello.txt"
     content  = "built by terraform\n"
   }

3. 3

   Ask what it WOULD do

   Initialise, then run a plan. Read the output properly. It tells you exactly what will be created, changed or destroyed, and nothing has happened yet. This preview-before-acting habit is most of what separates infrastructure people who are safe from ones who are not.

   Any

   terraform init
   terraform plan

4. 4

   Make it real

   Apply it. Look in the out/ folder — the file exists. Now run plan again: it reports no changes, because reality already matches your description.

   Any

   terraform apply
   terraform plan

5. 5

   Break reality and watch it notice

   Delete the file it made, by hand. Run plan again. It has detected drift — reality no longer matches the description — and it tells you precisely how to get back. Apply again and it repairs itself. This is the moment the idea usually lands.

   Any

   terraform plan
   terraform apply

6. 6

   Add three more, then destroy everything

   Change the resource to create three files instead of one using count = 3. Plan, apply. Then run destroy: everything it made is gone, and only your description remains. You can rebuild it identically, forever, from four lines of text. That property is what the whole cloud industry is built on.

   Any

   terraform destroy

Uses the account settings pages you already have. Nothing to install. You will likely also improve your own security materially, which is a decent side effect.

1. 1

   Find the account that owns all the others

   Start at your main email. Now list every service that would send a password reset there. That is not a list of accounts — it is a list of things someone gets for free the moment they take that one. Security people call this blast radius, and it is the single most useful concept in identity work.

2. 2

   Check what is actually guarding it

   Look at the security settings of that email account. Is there a second factor? Is it SMS — which is interceptable — or an app or hardware key? Now check the recovery options: an old phone number or a disused backup address is a back door that bypasses everything else you just checked.

3. 3

   Review what you have handed out

   Find the third-party access page on your Google, Microsoft or Apple account — the list of apps you signed in to using it. Most people have twenty to eighty entries and recognise perhaps half. Read what each was granted. Some will have read access to your entire mailbox from a service you used once in 2019.

   Any

   Google:    myaccount.google.com/permissions

   Any

   Microsoft: account.microsoft.com/privacy → apps and services

   Any

   Apple:     appleid.apple.com → Sign in with Apple

4. 4

   Revoke, and notice how that feels

   Remove everything you do not currently use. Notice the hesitation — "what if something breaks?" That exact hesitation, multiplied across ten thousand employees and twenty years, is why organisations accumulate permissions nobody dares remove. You are feeling the central problem of identity engineering firsthand.

5. 5

   Check the sessions still open

   Most services list active sessions and signed-in devices. Look for a device you no longer own or a location you do not recognise. Sign them all out. Note how many services do not offer this at all — that absence is itself a finding.

6. 6

   Write the one-page assessment

   What is your most valuable account? What is the weakest path into it — is it the password, the second factor, the recovery method, or an app you granted access to years ago? What would you fix first if you had one hour? That prioritised write-up is exactly the deliverable an identity or GRC role produces, and doing it for yourself is the cheapest possible practice.