Built from the docs, so it fails where the cloud would

The hardest cloud exam topics are the ones you cannot try: a hybrid network with a data centre at the other end, an organisation of forty accounts, a stream at its peak, an incident at three in the morning. A free-tier account cannot build them, and reading about them does not show you why one design works and another drops the packet.

Tracesleuth is a game where you can. Each stage is an exam-style brief. You build or tune the design, run it, and the simulator follows every packet, request or record and stops at the exact hop, rule or limit that fails, with the reason, the concept and an exam tip.

The method

• Written from the documentation. Every rule the simulator applies comes from what the vendor's documentation says the service does, and each stage keeps its sources so a report of a mistake can quote them.
• Deterministic. The same design always gives the same result. Nothing is graded by AI, so a check that fails always says the same true thing about why.
• Tagged to the exam guides. Each stage names the sections of each exam guide it practises, and a certification path is every stage one guide covers, in study order.
• Marked like the exam. The recap reviews a working design the way an exam would: "it works, but a NAT gateway nobody needs" still loses the mark.

Where it is today

168 stages across 6 AWS domains, in 18 game types, on 10 certification paths. Azure and GCP are coming soon.

Independent

Tracesleuth is independent: it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft or Google, and is paid for by the people who buy it, not by a vendor or by advertising.

Write to us with a mistake, an idea or a question.