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Amazon Web Services AWS Broken Labs

Lab 05 - Web Access V

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 the WebPageURL in the stack Outputs doesn’t work.

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::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-05-web-access-v.yaml
  4. Enter a stack name (e.g., brokenlabs-vpc-lab-05) 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

Look at the WebPageURL value in the stack Outputs tab.

Expected: a valid URL like http://ec2-1-2-3-4.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ Actual: the URL looks like this:

http:///

The hostname is missing entirely. Clicking the URL produces an error in the browser because http:/// is not a valid address.

Fix the Lab

Diagnose why the URL is malformed and fix it so the stack Outputs contain a working WebPageURL.

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