Guided AWS & DevOps labs
Deploy a deliberately broken environment in your AWS account. Follow a guided lab to investigate what went wrong, fix it, and explain your findings.
Browse first. Create an account when you are ready to request lab access.
A server in one AWS region cannot reach a server in another. Your job is to find out why.
Your mission
Restore traffic between the two servers.
Your investigation
Check routes, security groups and network ACLs.
Your findings
Explain the cause and the changes you made.
Stuck? You have a way forward. Each lab includes hints and a solution guide.
Practice with the tools you will use at work
A workspace for your investigation
For developers and cloud engineers who want to build confidence by working through failures themselves.
A scenario, setup instructions and a runbook give your investigation a clear direction.
Try your own approach first. Open hints or the solution guide when you want a way forward.
Submit what you found for review and return to your saved progress in the lab workspace.
How it works
You run the environment.
We guide the investigation.
Pick a failure to investigate. Check the difficulty, prerequisites and available assets.
Use the provided Terraform where available. Run it in your AWS account and follow the clues.
Find the root cause, make the changes, and submit your findings for administrator review.
Remove the AWS resources and confirm cleanup. Approved findings plus cleanup complete the lab.
Your cloud account, your resources. Lab pages show AWS cost estimates. Destroy the resources after your investigation to stop ongoing charges.
Find your next investigation
Explore each scenario, see what is included, and choose a lab that fits your experience.
A cross-region private HTTP path fails across VPC peering. Find the missing route, security group rule, and network ACL rule.
Intermediate · 75-120 minutes
Around $1-$3 if destroyed after completion
A backend EC2 instance cannot connect to a PostgreSQL RDS database. Find and fix the root cause.
Beginner · 60-90 minutes
Current assets contain documentation only.
Terraform can create a Lambda function, but the apply fails because of a missing or unsafe IAM permission.
Intermediate · 45-75 minutes
Current assets contain documentation only.
Before you start
Understand what you need, what you get, and where your lab runs.
A platform for practicing AWS and DevOps troubleshooting through guided labs. Each scenario starts with a failure to investigate. The workspace brings together the mission, setup instructions, hints, a solution guide, your progress and your submissions.
For a deployable AWS lab, you need your own AWS account, suitable permissions, Terraform and the AWS CLI. Basic familiarity with the terminal helps. Read the lab's prerequisites before creating any resources.
You run the infrastructure in your own AWS account. AWS charges are separate from access to NotForExam. Each lab shows a cost estimate, and you are responsible for destroying resources and checking for anything left running.
Browse the catalog without an account. To use a protected workspace or download its assets, sign in and request access from the lab page. Access is currently granted by the team; there is no automated checkout.
Check the label on the lab card. “Terraform included” means configuration files are available. “Runbook preview” means the current assets are documentation only, so the download alone cannot deploy that environment.
Learn by investigating
Choose a scenario and read the lab overview. Your first investigation starts there.