Hands-On Labs

Reading about AWS is not the same as building on it. These 12 labs walk you through the console (and give the CLI equivalent) for the services the exam cares about most.

Money warning — read before you start

The AWS Free Tier does not cover everything. A few resources bill from the moment you create them regardless of Free Tier — most notably NAT Gateway, Elastic IPs left unattached, provisioned RDS/Aurora beyond Free-Tier limits, and data processed / data transfer. Each lab flags its non-free resources and ends with a teardown section. Always tear down.

#	Lab	Ties to
1	Build a Custom VPC	Networking, security
2	IAM Users, Roles & Policies	IAM Deep Dive
3	KMS & Secrets Manager	Data Protection
4	EC2 Auto Scaling + ELB	High Availability
5	RDS Multi-AZ	Database Resilience
6	SQS, SNS & EventBridge	Decoupling & DR
7	Lambda & Fargate	Compute Choices
8	S3, EBS & EFS	Storage Performance
9	DynamoDB & ElastiCache	DB & Caching Performance
10	Route 53 & CloudFront	Networking Performance
11	Cost Optimization	Cost Optimization
12	Cost Management Tools	Cost Management

Set a billing alarm first

Before any lab, create a Billing alarm / AWS Budget (see Lab 12) so you get an email if spend crosses, say, \$1.