Cybserve Labs

Build it. Break it. Watch it recover.

Labs are where the course's mental models meet a real system. Each one is Cybserve-owned source, built from a written specification, with a disposable lab profile and a production profile so the difference in operational intent is itself the lesson.

Lab 01: a 3-tier AWS platform designed for high availability in build

A web application firewall in front of an internet-facing load balancer, a web tier, an internal load balancer with its own security group, an application tier with separate liveness and readiness checks, and a Multi-AZ database in subnets with no route to the internet. No SSH: Session Manager through private endpoints. A pipeline where the plan that is reviewed is the plan that is applied.

Twelve stages, built one relationship at a time, then four ways to break it: kill a web instance, break the database, lose a zone, add a wrong security-group rule and watch where the packet stops.

Status: implementation complete and syntax-validated; the first apply, acceptance run and real screenshots are next. We will call the validated profile highly available only after the failure tests (instance loss, database failover, zone loss, a wrong security-group rule) have been run and measured. Estimated lab cost: about £7–8 a day in eu-west-2 at prices checked on 5 October 2026, excluding unusual data transfer and tax; the observed cost from our acceptance run will replace this estimate. The lab ships with a budget alert (AWS Budgets notifications at 50% and 100% of a monthly limit; an alert, not a hard stop) and a one-command destroy.

Start with the Terraform course