// the take
A library of standalone AWS demo projects — CloudFormation templates plus step-by-step instructions and architecture diagrams — built as companion material for Adrian Cantrill's learn.cantrill.io courses. It's for people studying for AWS certifications or wanting a working reference architecture for things like hybrid DNS, Site-to-Site VPN, or a serverless pipeline, without paying for the course itself.
The free content isn't a teaser — it's the same 1-click-deploy CloudFormation stacks used in the paid course, so you get real, deployable infrastructure rather than snippets. Breadth is genuinely wide: VPN/BGP, Cognito federation, DMS migrations, hybrid Active Directory, ECS pipelines — each as a self-contained project you can spin up independently. Instructions are paired directly with architecture diagrams rather than just prose, which matters for anything touching networking or IAM. The author actively takes PRs for bug fixes (even incentivizes them), so stale templates do get corrected over time.
No CI validates the CloudFormation templates against API or service changes, so templates can silently break as AWS evolves between course updates — the repo's own README flags at least one project as broken and unusable. These are one-shot teaching demos, not modules meant to be composed or reused in production; there's no versioning or semantic stability guarantee if you build on top of one. Several stacks provision non-trivial AWS resources (NAT gateways, DMS instances, directory services) that cost real money if you forget to tear them down, and there's no automated cleanup. It's effectively a one-person project despite the size of the fork count, so anything not tied to active course content may sit unfixed for a while.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →