Maths for Cloud Jobs: The Only Topics You Actually Need (& How to Learn Them)
If you are applying for cloud computing jobs in the UK you might have noticed something frustrating: job descriptions rarely ask for “maths” directly yet interviews often drift into capacity, performance, reliability, cost or security trade-offs that are maths in practice. The good news is you do not need degree-level theory to be job-ready. For most roles like Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, SRE, Cloud Architect, FinOps Analyst or Cloud Security Engineer you keep coming back to a small set of practical skills: Units, rates & back-of-the-envelope estimation (requests per second, throughput, latency, storage growth) Statistics for reliability & observability (percentiles, error rates, SLOs, error budgets) Capacity planning & queueing intuition (utilisation, saturation, Little’s Law) Cost modelling & optimisation (right-sizing, break-even thinking, cost per transaction) Trade-off reasoning under constraints (performance vs cost vs reliability) This guide explains exactly what to learn plus a 6-week plan & portfolio projects you can publish to prove it.