Ascent

Ascent is a certification prep platform for cloud and infrastructure engineers. It started as CloudMaster Academy and was rebuilt and renamed as the scope grew past a single vendor's curriculum.

The Problem

Certification prep splits badly. Video courses teach the material but never test you under exam conditions. Question dumps test you but explain nothing, so a wrong answer teaches you the answer instead of the reasoning. Neither tells you which domain you are actually weak in.

What It Does

Every question is written to match the real exam's format and difficulty, tagged to its exam domain, and paired with an explanation of why the correct answer wins — the part that decides whether you remember it in three weeks.

Practice runs as domain-focused quizzes in sets of 10, 20, 40, or 65, with an optional timed mode that matches the real sitting. The Learn section browses each certification by provider, showing its domains, its passing score, and whether its question bank is ready.

Certification Tracks

Two are ready to study now:

Four more AWS tracks are in preparation — Developer Associate (DVA-C02), Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C02), DevOps Engineer Professional (DOP-C02), and Security Specialty (SCS-C02). The platform already models Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes as providers; their question banks are being built.

Still Being Built

Sandboxed cloud labs and the learning-game layer — card battles, RPG quests, daily challenges — are the two features the paid plans are waiting on. Practice questions, flashcards, and domain-level analytics are what works today, and the platform is free while it is in beta.

Architecture

Next.js on the frontend, NestJS behind the API, TypeScript throughout. Questions, domains, and providers are modelled as data rather than hardcoded per exam, which is what makes adding a new certification a content task instead of an engineering one — the difference between shipping two tracks and shipping ten.