Cloudathon@SJSU 2026 – Team 19 (Cloud Track)

Our experience solving AWS Jam Challenges

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Link to presentation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YWwcrVxeZPj7SHXFAtO8NONNomh4_fw_4xEe0eyHiB4/edit?usp=sharing

Goals

  • Complete the 14 AWS Jam challenges.
  • Learn fundamental AWS skills and concepts.
  • Have fun at the Cloudathon!

AWS Jam Challenges

Overview

  • Hands-on, gamified challenges simulating real-world AWS scenarios
  • Worked across services like CloudFront, ALB, IAM, VPC
  • Solved problems such as securing architectures, debugging failures, optimizing configurations
  • Built practical skills beyond theory through live cloud environments
  • Improved problem-solving, speed, and decision-making under pressure
  • Strengthened team collaboration and cloud architecture thinking
  • Gained experience similar to real cloud engineering tasks in production environments

Solutions

  1. Hello AWS Jam! – Website deployment
  2. Prepare to Fail(over) – Avoid single point of failure with ALB
  3. Protect my CloudFront Origin – Prevent unauthorized access with security groups
  4. Our CEO wants to say something but… – Loosen IAM and bucket policy restrictions
  5. No unencrypted databases allowed – Encrypt RDS using snapshots
  6. Encrypt the Data Lake – Use batch operation to fix bad encryption keys
  7. ARM64 your Databases – Modify Aurora database replica instances
  8. Bring it back in Style – Debugging S3 networking
  9. Data with the Stars! – Create IAM policies to restrict access to resources
  10. Lost in Metadata: Solving the EC2 Instance Puzzle – Connect to EC2 with RDP
  11. Your Query Whisperer – LLM prompt engineering with SageMaker AI
  12. CloudFormation Sherlock!! – Debugging CloudFormation pipelines
  13. Patch me if you can! – Bulk patching in Systems Manager
  14. Serverless Nightwatch – CloudWatch logging and Lambda pipelines

Our process & challenges

  • Divide up the work evenly between all team members
  • Communicate progress frequently
  • Helping team members when one was stuck
  • New at cloud development, didn't know the solutions to all the challenges immediately
  • Broke a lot of stuff while experimenting and learning

What we learned & what's next

  • Importance of automation in cloud systems
  • Designing for security, scalability, and reliability
  • Hands-on experience with AWS service integration
  • Strong skills in debugging and troubleshooting cloud systems
  • Commitment to continuous learning and applying skills to real-world, production-level projects
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