AWS Playground
Cloud topics don't simulate AWS — they hand you a shell with real AWS credentials in a real, sandboxed AWS account. The AWS CLI is preinstalled and already authenticated:
aws sts get-caller-identity
That's a real answer from real AWS, as you can verify from the account id it returns.
What you practice
The AWS Fundamentals skill walks the core loop every cloud engineer knows by hand: verify your identity, launch a real EC2 instance, inspect its security groups and storage, and terminate it cleanly. Your Submit checks are graded against the live AWS APIs — a check like "an instance is running with tag X" queries AWS itself, so the only way to pass is for the infrastructure to really exist.
Guardrails
The account is yours for the session, but it is deliberately constrained so mistakes can't become bills:
| Guardrail | What it means |
|---|---|
| Region | us-east-1 only |
| Compute | one t3.micro at a time |
| Images | approved AMIs only |
| Storage | gp3 volumes up to 20 GiB |
| Lifetime | stop or expiry revokes credentials |
When your session ends, credentials are revoked, any resources you left behind are cleaned up automatically, and the account is recycled. You cannot run up a bill and you cannot break anything that outlives your session — experiment freely.