Cloud Computing
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50 free Cloud Computing trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cloud computing sounds weightless, but it runs on warehouses full of humming machines, miles of cable and a surprising amount of improvisation. In a couple of decades it has changed how software is sold, how start-ups are built and where your photos live. This quiz covers the ground an introductory course would: the main service and deployment models, the jargon of scaling, storage and uptime, and the big providers and their best-known products. It also tells the stories behind the technology, from early predictions of computing as a utility to famous outages, odd product names and data centres in unlikely places. It suits students revising for a cloud certification, IT staff who want a quick check of the fundamentals, and anyone curious about what the cloud really is. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you pick something up whether or not you get it right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where did Microsoft's Project Natick keep a sealed capsule of 864 servers running for two years?
On the seafloor
On the seafloor off Orkney, Scotland, the shipping-container-sized vessel ran from 2018 until it was lifted out in July 2020. Seawater at its natural temperature did all the cooling.
Q 02Which retro ornaments does Cloudflare film in its San Francisco lobby as a source of random numbers?
Lava lamps
Lava lamps, about 100 of them, fill a wall that a camera watches around the clock. The drifting wax gives Cloudflare's servers a backup supply of randomness, an idea first tried at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.
Q 03What caused the February 2017 failure that left Amazon's S3 storage service down for hours?
A mistyped command
A mistyped command did it: an engineer debugging the billing system meant to remove a few servers and took out far more. The crippled subsystems then needed a full restart.
Q 04Which streaming company built Chaos Monkey, a tool that randomly disables its own live servers?
Netflix
Netflix built it while moving onto Amazon's cloud, then released the code in 2012. It grew into a whole Simian Army of tools that break things on purpose.
Q 05Which file-syncing service did Drew Houston conceive after he kept forgetting his USB drive at MIT?
Dropbox
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Houston and fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, with early money from the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Q 06Which webmail service was mistaken for an April Fools' prank when it launched with 1 GB of storage?
Gmail
Gmail arrived on 1 April 2004 with a gigabyte per user when 2 to 4 megabytes was the norm. Google's record of April pranks made the press release look like one more.
Q 07Which vehicle was AWS Snowmobile, unveiled in 2016 to carry up to 100 petabytes of customer data?
A truck
A truck, despite the wintry name: it followed Snowball, a 50-pound device that held 50 terabytes. Carrying data physically instead of sending it over a network is nicknamed sneakernet.
Q 08Which Microsoft cloud service, unveiled in 2008 as Project Red Dog, is named after a shade of blue?
Azure
Azure went on sale in February 2010 as Windows Azure and was renamed Microsoft Azure in 2014.
Q 09Which 2016 mobile game drew 50 times its planned player traffic on Google Cloud soon after launch?
Pokémon Go
Pokémon Go passed its expected server use within a quarter of an hour of release in Australia and New Zealand. The peak was ten times the engineers' worst-case estimate.
Q 10Which animal is the mascot of Docker, software that delivers apps in packages called containers?
Whale
The whale is called Moby Dock, a name Docker's community picked in a 2013 poll that drew 411 votes.
Q 11Which kind of industrial building in Hamina, Finland, did Google buy in 2009 to house a data centre?
A paper mill
A paper mill called Summa was sold to Google by Stora Enso for 40 million euros. The servers inside are cooled with seawater drawn from the Gulf of Finland.
Q 12Which container system, announced by Google in 2014, is named after the Greek word for helmsman?
Kubernetes
Kubernetes carries the nautical theme into its logo, a ship's wheel with seven spokes. The seven nods to its code name, Project 7, after the Star Trek character Seven of Nine.
Q 13Which big-data framework did Doug Cutting name after a toy elephant that belonged to his son?
Hadoop
Q 21Which software, also called a virtual machine monitor, lets one computer run several guest systems?
Hypervisor
A hypervisor differs from an emulator because its guests run most instructions directly on the real hardware. The computer underneath is known as the host machine.
Q 22Which software design has one running instance serve many customers, each with their own data?
Multitenancy
Multitenancy calls each customer group a tenant, and every tenant gets a dedicated slice of the instance, including its own configuration and user management.
Q 23Which kind of scaling, also called scaling out, adds more machines instead of upgrading one?
Horizontal
Hadoop got the name while Cutting was working at Yahoo. It was designed to spread huge jobs across clusters of cheap commodity hardware rather than one giant machine.
Q 14Amazon's Mechanical Turk is named after a fake 18th-century automaton that played which game?
Chess
Chess was the Turk's game, though a human master hidden in the cabinet made every move. Amazon launched its namesake site in 2005 to farm small tasks out to human workers.
Q 15Zoom and Spotify are examples of which cloud service model, where the provider runs the whole app?
SaaS
SaaS stands for software as a service, usually paid for by subscription instead of bought outright. Customer relationship management tools were one of its earliest successful markets.
Q 16In the cloud term IaaS, covering rented servers, storage and networks, what does the I stand for?
Infrastructure
Infrastructure as a service leaves customers to deploy and run their own operating systems and applications on the rented hardware.
Q 17Which cloud deployment model binds a firm's private systems to rented public capacity?
Hybrid
Hybrid setups allow cloud bursting, where an application runs in-house and spills over to public capacity only when demand jumps. The firm pays for the extra power just when it is needed.
Q 18Which misleading term covers services like AWS Lambda, which run code with no machines to manage?
Serverless
Serverless is a misnomer, because the provider's servers still execute the code. Billing is typically pay-per-use, so idle time costs the customer nothing.
Q 19Which software maker ended new Creative Suite releases in 2013, moving its design tools to subscription only?
Adobe
Adobe moved Photoshop and its other design tools to Creative Cloud, ending one-off perpetual licences for new versions.
Q 20Which line of laptops, first sold in June 2011 with models from Acer and Samsung, was built around web access?
Chromebook
Chromebook laptops run ChromeOS, an operating system developed by Google, and were announced at the company's I/O conference a month before they shipped.
Horizontal scaling lets groups of ordinary computers handle work that once needed expensive supercomputers. Its opposite, vertical scaling, adds processors, memory or storage to a single machine.
Q 24Which device spreads incoming requests across a pool of servers so that none is overwhelmed?
Load balancer
A load balancer aims to make processing more efficient overall, improving response times and keeping some machines from being overloaded while others sit unused.
Q 25Roughly how much downtime a year does a five nines target, meaning 99.999 percent uptime, allow?
About 5 minutes
About 5 minutes a year is all it allows, a handy match between the count of nines and the minutes. Each nine dropped multiplies the allowance by ten, so four nines permits roughly 50 minutes.
Q 26In EC2, Amazon's service for renting virtual computers by the second, what does the E stand for?
Elastic
Elastic reflects how customers can create and shut down servers as needed and pay only while they run. The full name, Elastic Compute Cloud, has two Cs, hence the 2.
Q 27Amazon's S3 service, launched in March 2006, groups stored objects into containers called what?
Buckets
Buckets group the objects, which are the basic storage units of S3. The service reached Europe in November 2007, twenty months after its American debut.
Q 28What name does AWS give to groups of data centres set far enough apart to avoid failing together?
Availability zones
Availability zones sit far enough apart to dodge a shared disaster yet close enough for low-latency links. Several of them together make up a region.
Q 29Which US state contains Ashburn, a community nicknamed Data Center Alley for its many server farms?
Virginia
Virginia hosts the cluster in Ashburn, a major hub for internet traffic. The Wikimedia Foundation, parent of Wikipedia, keeps data centres there alongside Amazon Web Services.
Q 30Which icy name did Amazon give its low-cost archive storage, built for rarely accessed data?
Glacier
Glacier trades speed for price, and the slow job of fetching an archive back out is nicknamed thawing.