AWS offers many learning resources when it comes to the cloud. You can enroll in instructor-led online courses, follow structured learning plans, utilize practice exams and study guides, read through tutorials and guides, access the forums, and gain hands-on experience with labs. However, there is one other method of learning the cloud that AWS offers, and it is perhaps the most intriguing—game-based learning. The title of the main game AWS offers is called Cloud Quest.

In Cloud Quest, you create your avatar and roam around a new, undeveloped city, assisting citizens with their infrastructure issues. You have a set criteria of topics and issues to lend your cloud expertise to solve cloud migration use cases for the citizens of Questopia (I love that name, and if AWS wants to use it from me, they can contact my people 😉). Upon resolving the citizens' issues, you earn rewards to purchase cool items for your avatar, unlock upgrades to build Questopia in your preferred style, and most importantly, gain progress towards real badges that you can show off on your Credly account! Continue reading for a walkthrough of what the Questopian life is like as a cloud engineer.

The layout of the starting area—Cloud Isle—is a large rectangular plot of land surrounded by neighboring cities, which can be switched to if focusing on a different badge path. Around the city, you will find the locations of citizens who need your cloud engineering expertise. The city is much larger than it seems on the mini-map, but thankfully, they have fast travel and auto-routing for getting to the targeted citizen.

Interacting With Citizens

When you interact with the citizens, you will engage in a conversation that will lay out the issue they are facing. After accepting the challenge, you will drop into a planning screen that has three different steps—Learn, Lab, DIY. The Learn step will show you a visual of the architecture you are implementing, along with concept information and logical steps for achieving the desired result. There are also helpful videos you can play when a new topic or service is introduced to further solidify your understanding. Upon completion of the Learn step, you will move on to the Lab. One very cool aspect of Cloud Quest is that AWS provisions the lab environments for you on each challenge, ensuring you start fresh with the resources needed to make the use case make sense. This usually takes a few minutes to set up, so you can look through the steps in the Lab while you wait. The Lab does a great job of thoroughly explaining the steps and concepts with visuals and indicators throughout. The end result of the Labs is necessary for the DIY section, so ensuring a proper understanding with guided instruction is crucial.

For the final step, the DIY, you will typically complete the solution to the original issue. With the knowledge you gained from the Learn and the Lab, you will have all the necessary tools to complete the DIY. Personally, in the DIY I really try to accomplish the tasks without referencing the Lab, but you need to use the exact same naming conventions a lot of the time, so I found myself going back and forth to ensure I named things correctly. Plus, it didn’t hurt to double-check that I entered something correctly.

Here is an example of a citizen issue you resolve from start to finish:

Joe Shmo has three Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) for his company. He has a VPC for his finance department, a VPC for his marketing department, and a VPC for his development department. For whatever reason, Joe needs to allow his development VPC and marketing VPC to communicate with the finance VPC.

Our conversation with Joe gives us insight into how we will solve this problem. This specific problem is solved by creating peering connections between the private networks. The Learn step explains to us the general concept of peering networks and what they aim to accomplish. In the Lab, they walk us through how to create a peering connection, test our connection between one VPC and another, check our subnets for each VPC, configure our firewalls, and finally establish the peering connection. The following DIY section prompts us to create the second peering connection needed based on the information we learned in the Lab. Once that is complete, we are able to test our solution and either get a confirmation message or an error hinting at where we may have gone wrong.

Now, odds are you are one sharp cloud engineer, and you resolved Joe’s issue. WOO WHOOO! 🎉 You now get your choice of three different architectures for your city and a ton of reward points! Not to mention that coveted badge progress.

Cloud Quest Pets

While the main goal is to assist citizens and build your city, there are many side quests available to continue sharpening your cloud knowledge. You can find pets around the city that you can track down based on the paw prints that appear in front of you 🐾. When you interact with a potential pet, you are faced with a random question about the AWS cloud. If you answer the question correctly, you will earn progress towards unlocking the pet. When equipped, your new loyal companion will follow you around the city. There is a wide range of animals you can befriend—I am currently working on King Kong, but he isn’t easily impressed, so we aren’t there yet. 😂

Vehicle Fleet

One of my personal favorite things to unlock is transportation vehicles. Personally, walking everywhere takes much too long. However, you don’t always want to fast travel because you’d like to admire the city you are building. Thankfully, you can purchase pretty awesome rides from your accrued gems from satisfied citizens. My current favorite is the rocket ship 🚀.

Smart Phone

You can access everything you need from your in-game smartphone, much like real life. While these include features we already discussed, I will talk about the things we have not brought up yet, such as the knowledge library. The knowledge library keeps track of everything you have learned up to this point. This includes all videos and the labs of the citizen issues you solved, which is very helpful when you want to solidify your understanding or attempt to solve the DIY completely on your own without the guidance of the Lab (be mindful of the specific naming you may need in some labs, but for most, you should be fine as long as your naming conventions are consistent in the new environment).

Other features include challenges, but I suspect this may be a work in progress because I have yet to see a challenge available in the Cloud Practitioner City. There’s also badge progression and links to your Credly badge and certifications portfolio, the ability to view and invite friends, your Builder Level with a list of your solutions built(i.e., First NoSQL Database), and how many more solutions are needed to upgrade your Builder Level.

Conclusion

Overall, I believe this to be a very engaging and effective way to learn the AWS cloud. Of course, this should not be the sole source of learning and knowledge for the cloud. I strongly recommend taking full courses, utilizing practice exams and resources, reading guides, doing more hands-on labs, reading blogs, and more. But, this is such a fun way to keep you wanting to learn more about the cloud and build cloud solutions with best practices in mind. 🚀