From Zero to AWS Academy: Building Production-Grade Cloud Labs

As a DevOps Engineer at Infobip and an AWS Academy Educator at Virovitica University of Applied Sciences — one of only two institutions in Croatia running the program — I’ve spent the past few years bringing my production experience into the classroom. AWS Academy gives students a real curriculum and real sandbox environments; what I focus on is improving how students actually learn from them — making sure they understand how cloud resources interact and depend on each other, not just which buttons to click to provision them.

This session covers two things I’ve built on top of AWS Academy’s Learner Lab to support that goal: reproducible lab environments that let students focus on learning instead of fighting broken setups, and assessments built around intentionally broken infrastructure that push students to diagnose problems systematically — the same way they would in production.

If you’d like to bring more of that real-world, production thinking into a classroom — or know someone at a university who would — this talk shows one way to do it.