CloudPath Academy

Your guide to AWS certification success

Amazon Web Services AWS Broken Labs

Lab 03 - Web Access II

Difficulty: Beginner Service: Amazon EC2

Cost: This lab uses a t2.micro instance (Free Tier eligible) and allocates one Elastic IP, which is billed at about $0.005/hour (~$0.12/day) and is not covered by the Free Tier. If left running outside the Free Tier, the total cost is at most about $0.42/day. Complete the lab and delete the stack promptly.

Scenario

Your team deployed a web server on EC2. The stack completed successfully and the instance is running — but the WebPageURL in the stack Outputs doesn’t load.

What Was Deployed

Resource Purpose
AWS::EC2::VPC Dedicated VPC for the lab
AWS::EC2::Subnet Subnet for the instance
AWS::EC2::InternetGateway Internet gateway attached to the VPC
AWS::EC2::RouteTable Route table with a default route to the internet
AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup Allows inbound traffic on ports 80 and 22
AWS::EC2::EIP An Elastic IP address
AWS::EC2::Instance t2.micro running Amazon Linux 2023 with a web server

The stack deployed without errors. Apache is running on the instance.

Deploy the Lab

  1. Open the AWS CloudFormation console
  2. Click Create stack > With new resources (standard)
  3. Select Upload a template file and upload lab-03-web-access-ii.yaml
  4. Enter a stack name (e.g., brokenlabs-ec2-lab-03) and click Next > Next > Submit
  5. Wait for the stack status to reach CREATE_COMPLETE (takes 2–3 minutes)
  6. Open the stack Outputs tab — you will see InstanceId, ElasticIPAddress, and WebPageURL

The Problem

Open the WebPageURL from the stack Outputs in your browser.

Expected: the AWS Broken Labs welcome page loads. Actual: the browser displays:

This site can't be reached
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

The instance is running and shows a healthy status in the EC2 console.

Fix the Lab

Diagnose why the problem occurs and fix it so the result matches Expected above.

Need help? Open hints.md for progressive hints.

Cleanup

Note: If you created any resources outside the stack while fixing the lab, or attached anything to the stack’s resources by hand, remove those first. The full solution in hints.md lists any extra cleanup steps.

  1. Open CloudFormation, select your stack, and click Delete
  2. Wait for the stack to reach DELETE_COMPLETE (or disappear from the list)
  3. Verify in the EC2 console that the instance no longer appears (or shows Terminated)
  4. Verify under Elastic IPs that no address from this lab remains

Resources