SA Pro Hands-On Labs
A build-it-yourself lab track for the Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) material in The Exam Room. The Professional exam is not a memory test; it rewards having actually stood the architectures up. Each lab gives you a working base (CloudFormation plus a couple of scripts) and asks you to build the part that carries the design decision. You deploy real AWS resources, prove the behaviour, and tear it down.
The idea: scaffolding that fades
Same shape as the GenAI track. Early labs are almost finished and you fill one
clearly-marked gap; later labs hand you less. Every lab ships a solution/ you
can deploy at any point (SRC=solution), so you are never stuck.
| Scaffold | What you’re given | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| 5/5 | Everything but one value or function body | Fill the gap, deploy, prove it |
| 3/5 | Infra and data, no wiring | Connect the pieces |
| 1/5 | A requirement and a skeleton | Design and build most of it |
| 0/5 | A requirement | Build it from scratch |
Before your first lab
Do the one-time, once-per-account setup: run preflight.sh (it ships in every
lab zip) to confirm your account is ready, then deploy the
lab reaper once. The reaper
is a standing backstop that auto-deletes any lab you forget to tear down after 24
hours, so a forgotten stack becomes a deleted stack instead of a running bill.
Every SA Pro lab’s deploy.sh tags its stack for the reaper automatically.
The arc
The track walks the four SAP-C02 domains. All six labs are built; the scaffold column shows how much each one hands you.
| # | Lab | Domain | Scaffold | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Fan out events with SNS and filter with SQS | D2 Decoupling | 4/5 | built |
| 02 | Route between VPCs with a Transit Gateway | D1 Networking | 3/5 | built |
| 03 | Immutable, replicated backups with S3 Object Lock | D1/D3 Resilience | 3/5 | built |
| 04 | Blue/green: shift traffic with a weighted forward | D2 Deployment | 3/5 | built |
| 05 | Enforce a team tag and read the cost back | D1 Cost visibility | 2/5 | built |
| 06 | Replicate a database with DMS and change data capture | D4 Migration | 1/5 | built |
Each built lab has a walk-through post you can read alongside it, and is downloadable as a zip if you would rather not clone the repository.
The zips are built by scripts/build-lab-zips (also make lab-zips) into
zips/labs/ and committed, so they publish with the site. Re-run it whenever a
lab changes.