I've run networks for twenty years. Going deep on AWS's hybrid-networking stack still humbled me — and it wasn't the concepts. It was that I couldn't practice the parts that mattered.
The topics you can't afford to touch
Advanced AWS networking leans hard on hybrid connectivity: Transit Gateway routing, Direct Connect, BGP path selection, private/public/transit VIFs, Direct Connect Gateway. These are exactly the topics that are brutal to practice on real AWS:
-
A 1 Gbps dedicated Direct Connect port runs ~
$216/mo— and it requires physical presence at an AWS DX colo facility. Rack rent and a cross-connect put a real multi-VIF lab out of reach for almost every solo learner. -
A realistic two-month study environment lands somewhere between
$500and$2,500+, more if you go down the dedicated-DX path. - Everything meters while you fumble: TGW attachments, VPN, NAT, public IPv4, data transfer.
So most people do what I did: stare at architecture diagrams and hope the routing works the way they think it does.
What I wanted instead
I wanted to drag a topology onto a canvas, run "trace connectivity from A to B," and watch the path either reach or break — with the engine telling me exactly which hop failed and why. Routing you can poke at. A wrong answer that teaches.
That tool didn't exist. Quiz banks test recall. Video courses are great but their labs run on your AWS bill. LocalStack and friends mock the AWS control plane so SDKs can talk to a fake API — they don't model routing at all.
So I built it
TransitLab models the AWS data plane — the routing itself — faithfully enough to learn from, entirely in the browser, with no AWS account and no bill. You build a topology, run a trace, and read the path hop by hop. It's free.
It's a SoraWorx project, built in the open. New to it? The help page walks through how to use the simulator and is honest about what it does and doesn't model.