Over the AWS Jam I worked through fifteen hands-on challenges spanning IAM, S3, RDS, EC2, Lambda, and Bedrock.
A few highlights. I solved a "CEO message" puzzle where access was blocked by two separate deny policies — one on the IAM role, one on the bucket — and learned that identity-based and resource-based policies are evaluated independently. Both have to permit access.
I migrated an Aurora cluster from x86 to Graviton with zero downtime by snapshotting first, modifying the reader, and triggering a controlled failover.
I debugged a Windows EC2 instance that couldn't reach the metadata service — turned out the AMI was captured without Sysprep, leaving a stale route to the wrong gateway. The AWS-side network looked perfect; the bug was inside the guest OS.
The biggest takeaway: cloud problems are rarely one-layer problems. Every hard challenge had a hidden second layer — and the real skill is the instinct to ask, what am I not looking at yet?
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