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Amazon Web Services AWS Broken Labs

Lab 02 - Web Access II

Difficulty: Intermediate Service: Amazon VPC

Cost: This lab uses a t2.micro instance (Free Tier eligible). If left running outside the Free Tier, the cost is approximately $0.30/day. Delete the stack when you are done.

Scenario

Your team deployed a web server on EC2 in a custom VPC. The CloudFormation stack completed successfully and the instance is running. But when you open the URL, the page won’t load.

What Was Deployed

Resource Purpose
AWS::EC2::VPC Custom VPC for the lab (10.0.0.0/16)
AWS::EC2::Subnet Subnet with auto-assign public IP enabled
AWS::EC2::InternetGateway Internet Gateway — created and attached to the VPC
AWS::EC2::RouteTable Route table with a 0.0.0.0/0 route to the Internet Gateway
AWS::EC2::NetworkAcl Network ACL associated with the subnet
AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup Inbound rule allowing HTTP on port 80
AWS::EC2::Instance t2.micro running a web server

The stack deployed without errors. The instance is running and the web server is active.

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-02-web-access-ii.yaml
  4. Enter a stack name (e.g., brokenlabs-vpc-lab-02) 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, InstancePublicIP, 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 page won’t load and fix it so the result matches Expected above. After applying your fix, reload the WebPageURL to confirm the page loads.

Need help? Open hints.md for progressive hints.

Cleanup

  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)

Resources