Hands-on cloud building and troubleshooting with AWS Jam
During the past year, I participated in 2 live online AWS Jam events announced on the AWS Experience platform. Jams challenge individuals and teams to apply their AWS cloud skills in a sandboxed environment to solve real-world problems using AWS services.
So far, I've noticed that Jams usually consist of 9–10 challenges with subtasks each, and you get a couple of hours, let's say 4-5 hours depending on the specific Jam, to compete for a place on the leaderboard and potentially prizes. Each team can have 1-4 members, organizers of live events can decide to randomize team members, so be flexible on that.
It is best that at one time only one person works on one specific challenge, so decide if you will all gather around one shared screen and collaborate on a solution, or if each team member should work on the challenge they choose.
Jam challenges teach AWS best practices around security compliance, machine learning, devops, serverless, event notifications, databases, networking, and more. You can select challenges by technical domain or role and by difficulty level. Also, you can solve challenges by using Management Console, CLI, CodeWhisperer, whatever you are more comfortable with, or if you want to try another approach.
In this AWS London Summit 2023 | AWS On Air ft. AWS Jam Journeys video, you can see what the challenge user interface could look like and what else to expect:
Clues, or hints, are available to help navigate the challenges if needed, but they reduce from the max number of points available. There are 3 levels of clues, and the last one is usually a step-by-step walkthrough. When the Jam timer counts zero, the sandbox is left open for some time for you and your team to complete challenges and practice, but these points do not go toward prizes.
For example, here you can see my team scored third overall at Deloitte Jam in December 2023. Although we were the team that solved most challenges, we used more hints than other teams, which placed us lower. Which is totally fine because our goal was to learn, familiarize ourselves with any new services we do not have the chance to work with day to day, and take good notes :)
I caught these live online Jams as free events with a registration. In Skill Builder, there are various Jams you can take on-demand with a paid subscription:
