Cloud is where the workloads went, and it is where the attackers followed. Most enterprises are on some journey towards running identity, data and compute across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and each of those platforms has its own attack surface that traditional network pentesting never had to think about. That has created one of the fastest-growing and best-paid roles in offensive security: the cloud penetration tester. This guide walks through exactly what the role is, the skills and certifications that matter, and a realistic, step-by-step path to your first job, whether you are coming from IT, development, or a traditional security background.
What is a cloud penetration tester?
A cloud penetration tester is an offensive security specialist who attacks cloud environments the way a real adversary would, then reports the findings so defenders can fix them. Instead of scanning a corporate network for open ports, you are enumerating identity and access management (IAM) policies, abusing over-permissioned roles, stealing credentials from metadata services, and pivoting between managed services like storage buckets, serverless functions and Kubernetes clusters.
The core difference from traditional penetration testing is that in the cloud, identity is the perimeter. Most cloud breaches are not memory-corruption exploits. They are a chain of misconfigurations. Initial access alone could be a leaked access key, a vulnerable application hosted in the cloud, a role that can be assumed by anyone or a public storage bucket containing secrets. Your job is to find, chain and demonstrate those weaknesses, so that defenders can fix them before someone with worse intentions is able to leverage them.
What does a cloud penetration tester actually do?
Day to day, the work usually looks like some mix of the following:
- Enumeration and reconnaissance of a cloud account or tenant: mapping IAM users, roles, service accounts, resources and trust relationships.
- Privilege escalation: turning a low-privileged identity into an administrator by abusing risky permissions and policy misconfigurations.
- Lateral movement: pivoting across accounts, subscriptions, projects, and from cloud into connected on-prem or SaaS environments.
- Data access: reaching sensitive data in object storage, databases, secrets managers and snapshots.
- Reporting: writing up the attack path, the business impact, and clear, prioritized remediation. The report is the product, and strong writing is a genuine differentiator.
Some roles lean purely offensive (red team, adversary emulation), while others are hybrid, where you are expected to both attack and recommend the detections and hardening that would have caught you. The strongest cloud testers (and security professionals in general) understand both sides.
Is cloud penetration testing a good career?
Demand is strong. Organizations are moving faster than their security teams can keep up with, especially in the age of AI. And there are far more people who understand traditional pentesting than people who genuinely understand cloud attack paths. Information security is one of the best-paid and fastest-growing fields in technology: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for information security analysts at about $124,910 a year, with employment projected to grow 29 percent through 2034, much faster than the average for all occupations. Cloud-focused and offensive skills sit at the higher end of that range, and the skill set travels well into cloud security engineering, detection engineering, and consulting.
It is also durable. Cloud adoption is still climbing, hybrid identity keeps getting more complex, and now AI and Kubernetes workloads are adding entirely new surfaces. The role is not going away; it is expanding.
Skills you need to become a cloud penetration tester
You do not need all of this on day one, but this is the shape of what a competent cloud tester knows.
Foundations
- Networking and Linux: you should have comfort on the command line, an understanding of HTTP, DNS, TLS and how systems talk to each other.
- Scripting: Python is great for rapid prototyping, along with Bash scripts to automate tool calls. You will read and modify tooling constantly.
- Web fundamentals: many cloud footholds start with a web vulnerability (SSRF, injection, insecure deserialization) that then reaches cloud credentials. SSRF is especially dangerous in the cloud, with the presence of the Instance Metadata Service. Although cloud providers enforce authentication to access this service, if an underlying application library supports the Gopher protocol, it's still possible to gain access.
Cloud fundamentals
- Pick one provider and go deep before going wide. Learn how its IAM model actually works, how identities and roles are assumed, and how its core services (compute, storage, serverless, secrets, logging) are configured and misconfigured.
- Understand the shared responsibility model and where the customer's misconfigurations, not the provider's, create risk.
Offensive cloud skills
- IAM enumeration and privilege escalation paths.
- Credential theft from instance metadata, environment variables, source code and CI/CD.
- Attacking managed services: storage, serverless, containers and Kubernetes, databases and secrets.
- Lateral movement across accounts and into hybrid identity (for example, on-prem AD into Entra ID).
- Detection awareness: knowing what your actions look like in cloud logs, so you can advise defenders.
The step-by-step path
- Build the foundations. Get comfortable with Linux, Python and web security basics. If you are coming from IT or development, you already have a head start here.
- Learn one cloud deeply. Choose the provider most common in your target job market (AWS is the largest, Azure dominates Microsoft-heavy enterprises, Google Cloud is strong in data and tech). Learn its identity model cold.
- Get hands-on in real environments. Reading is not enough. You learn cloud attack paths by executing them. Work through hands-on cloud security labs in live AWS, Azure and GCP accounts, where you enumerate, escalate and pivot against real services rather than slides.
- Earn a hands-on certification. Certifications open doors and prove capability, but only the practical ones prove skill. Prioritize exams that make you attack a live environment (more on which ones below).
- Build a public portfolio. Publish lab writeups, document your methodology, and share tooling on GitHub. This is how you get discovered, and it is exactly how the most-linked people in this field built their reputations.
- Specialize. Once you can operate in one cloud, expand to multi-cloud, then into the high-demand adjacent surfaces: Kubernetes and container security, hybrid and Active Directory, and AI and LLM security. Breadth across these is rare and valuable.
Where to start based on your background
Almost nobody starts cloud penetration testing from zero. Most people arrive from an adjacent field and convert what they already know. If you are still building the underlying fundamentals, our Cloud Security Engineer roadmap maps the ten core areas and where to begin from each background, and this guide is its offensive counterpart. Here is where to focus depending on where you are starting from.
Coming from traditional penetration testing or red teaming
You already have the most important thing: an attacker's methodology and the discipline to chain findings into real impact. What is new is that in the cloud, identity is the perimeter. Focus on how each provider's IAM model actually works, how roles and tokens are assumed and abused, and how cloud-native services like object storage, serverless functions, containers and secrets managers are attacked. Start by picking one provider and working real IAM enumeration and privilege-escalation labs, then practice pivoting from a compromised workload into the cloud account behind it.
Coming from cloud or DevOps engineering
Your automation, networking and configuration knowledge is a genuine head start, because you already know where misconfigurations hide and what a healthy environment looks like. What you need to add is the hacker mindset and offensive tooling. Learn to think about how the resources you build could be attacked, then get hands-on turning a leaked key or an over-permissioned role into account compromise. You will pick up attack paths quickly because you understand the plumbing.
Coming from a defensive security role (blue team)
You understand security concepts, logging and detection, which makes you a strong tester because you know what defenders see. The gap is offensive tradecraft: the specific IAM abuse, credential theft and lateral-movement techniques attackers use in the cloud. Work through hands-on attack scenarios, and pay attention to what each action looks like in cloud audit logs so the remediation advice you write actually lands. Blue to red is a well-worn path.
Coming from software development
You understand how applications and cloud infrastructure are actually built, including CI/CD, APIs and how secrets flow through a system, which is exactly where many cloud footholds begin. Add web exploitation fundamentals such as SSRF, injection and insecure deserialization, since these are frequently the first step that reaches cloud credentials, then learn one cloud provider's identity model and practice the chain from an application vulnerability to cloud account access.
Coming from IT or systems administration
Your comfort with operating systems, networking and identity transfers directly, and you have likely seen the kinds of misconfigurations that get exploited. Shore up your scripting in Python and Bash, pick one cloud provider and learn its IAM model cold, then move into offensive labs. Your operational instinct for what looks wrong will serve you well when enumerating an unfamiliar environment.
Starting with little or no IT background
It is possible, but cloud penetration testing is not an entry-level role, so build the foundations first. Get comfortable with Linux and the command line (the free OverTheWire Bandit wargame is a good start), learn the basics of one cloud provider, and pick up web security fundamentals. Then get real, beginner-friendly hands-on experience in live cloud accounts rather than only reading. The variable that matters most is how much time you spend actually attacking real environments.
Whichever background you are coming from, the next move is the same: pick one cloud, go deep on its identity model, and start attacking real environments. Explore the hands-on cloud security labs to begin.
Certifications that matter
The certification landscape splits into two groups. Knowledge-based, multiple-choice certs (such as vendor security-specialty exams and some vendor-neutral options) prove you understand concepts and can help you pass HR filters. Practical, hands-on certs prove you can actually do the work, because you have to compromise a live environment to pass. For an offensive cloud role, the practical ones carry far more weight.
Look for certifications that are earned in a real cloud account, cover a specific provider or attack surface, and come with a verifiable badge an employer can check. Pwned Labs offers a stacked path of hands-on, exam-in-a-live-account cloud red team certifications, the Amazon Cloud Red Team Professional (ACRTP), Microsoft Cloud Red Team Professional (MCRTP) and Google Cloud Red Team Professional (GCRTP), along with specialized Kubernetes and AI systems tracks and an expert-level Microsoft hybrid certification. Whichever provider you choose, the principle is the same: pick the credential that makes you prove the attack, not memorize a control name. If you want the full landscape in one place, the cloud penetration testing certification hub lays out how the tiers fit together.
Tools of the trade
You will collect your own kit over time, but a cloud tester's toolbox usually includes:
- Enumeration and exploitation frameworks for cloud IAM and services (for example, Pacu for AWS, and cross-cloud tooling like CloudFox and ScoutSuite).
- Attack-path mapping tools such as BloodHound and its cloud variants for visualizing privilege escalation and lateral movement.
- The provider CLIs (AWS CLI, Azure CLI, gcloud) and their APIs, which are your primary interface once you have credentials.
- A purpose-built offensive cloud environment. Rather than assembling tools yourself, distributions like the open-source PWNCLOUDOS package multi-cloud tooling for hackers and defenders in one place.
How to get hands-on experience
This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that actually makes you employable. You cannot learn to attack the cloud by watching. Options, roughly in order of value:
- Guided hands-on labs in live cloud accounts, where each lab is a realistic scenario you work end to end.
- Capture the Flag events and cyber ranges, which build speed and pattern recognition under pressure.
- A personal cloud account for safe experimentation, kept locked down and on a strict budget.
The key is repetition against realistic targets. The more attack chains you execute, the faster you recognize them in the wild.
How to build a portfolio that gets you hired
In offensive security, your public work is your resume. The people who get inbound job offers are usually the ones who have been publishing. Concretely:
- Write up the labs you solve. Explain the attack path, the reasoning, and the fix. Clear technical writing signals exactly the skill employers pay for.
- Share tooling and scripts on GitHub, even small ones.
- Be visible in the community. Answer questions, discuss techniques, and engage where practitioners gather.
How to land your first cloud pentesting job
Titles to target include cloud penetration tester, cloud red team operator, cloud security engineer with an offensive focus, and offensive security consultant. To improve your odds: tailor your portfolio to the provider the employer uses, be able to talk through a full attack chain from foothold to impact in an interview, and lean on your verifiable certifications, tool contributions and public writeups as proof. Consulting firms and managed security providers are often the fastest entry point, because they need cloud-capable testers and will let you work across many environments quickly.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be a penetration tester before going into cloud?
No. Plenty of people move into cloud pentesting from IT, development or cloud engineering. Those backgrounds give you an advantage in understanding how cloud systems are actually built and operated, which makes their weaknesses easier to spot.
How long does it take to become a cloud penetration tester?
With consistent hands-on practice, many people reach a hireable level in roughly six to twelve months, faster if you already have a security or cloud background. The variable that matters most is how much time you spend actually attacking real environments, not reading about them.
Which cloud should I learn first?
Learn the one most used in the roles you want. AWS has the largest overall market, Azure dominates Microsoft-centric enterprises, and Google Cloud is strong in data-driven and technology companies. Go deep on one before adding the others.
Are cloud penetration testing certifications worth it?
The hands-on, practical ones are, because they prove you can do the work and give you a verifiable credential employers can check. Multiple-choice certifications can help with HR screening but do not, on their own, demonstrate offensive skill.
What is the difference between cloud penetration testing and cloud security engineering?
Penetration testing is offensive: you find and exploit the weaknesses. Cloud security engineering is defensive: you design and harden the environment. The skills overlap heavily, and many people move between the two. Understanding the attacker mindset makes you a far better defender, and vice versa.
The fastest way to progress from here is to stop reading and start attacking. Work through real scenarios in live cloud accounts, write up what you learn, and earn a hands-on credential that proves it. Explore the cloud security labs to begin.