Gems & Landi: AWS Cloud Labs Documentation Series

August 23, 2026

What this is

An in-depth documentation series covering hands-on AWS cloud labs, maintained in Markdown/Obsidian and published in “The-Forge” repository. It exists because most AWS tutorials show you that something works, not why it’s configured that way — and the gap between those two things is where production incidents come from.

Scope

The series currently covers labs across:

• Networking — VPC design decisions, subnet strategy, routing edge cases
• Security — IAM policy structure, WAF rules, the reasoning behind least-privilege configurations rather than just the steps to enable them
• Serverless — Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB patterns, including the failure modes that don’t show up until you’ve pushed real traffic through them

Why the depth matters

Coming from a background where SOPs and technical documentation directly determined whether a NOC engineer at 3 AM could resolve an incident without escalating, I write these labs the same way: assume the reader needs to understand the decision, not just copy the command. That’s the standard I’m holding this series to — and it’s also, frankly, the standard I’d want from anyone documenting infrastructure I depend on.

Full series: The-Forge repository