@Amir_Zare tagging you since I believe you’re a mentor for this course.
Hi mentors,
Could you consider allocating more time than the 2 hours for complex assignments? I can complete the assignment in the 2 hours, but to actually understand, complete the optionals and explore other facets, it really does take a while. The 2 hr deadline or lose your work feels like it isn’t really helping on this lab. I felt this also for C3w1a1 but not quite as much.
Best,
Suraj
Hello @Suraj_Kamath
The team has already extended the time limit for more elaborate labs, such as capstone projects. Unfortunately, increasing this limit for all labs would be costly. However, you can always download your files before your lab session ends to prepare and get a head start for your next attempt.
Regards,
Amir
ok, I see a way to download the entire project files as a zip. i’ll give that a try.
I’m seeing this same request in many posts. Currently (maybe this has improved since the original post) the vscode environment where we edit files is preserved longer than 2 hours and if you retry the lab your files are still saved. Downloading all files before the time limit is still a good idea. You can only submit assignments while your cloud resources still exist.
The main issue at this time is that all AWS resources need to be recreated. This is a good example of why the orchestration we learn in this course is so valuable. However, there are still some manual steps on the command line that need to be repeated. It would be great if those could be done in the notebooks instead.
Is there a way to check how much time is left out of the 2 hours? A warning a couple minutes before would be very nice too. Thanks.
Thanks for the post Avi. The system did improve since my original post, with the vscode environment persisting the files. Downloading worked a little but not with more complex projects so the persisting vscode environment helped. The notebooks do have steps that need values manually copied from cloudformation so that needs to be done again, but after that its pretty easy to get started again after a timeout. The time limit does continue to be a psychological barrier though, forcing me to move quicker than I would like through the exercise, but I understand the tradeoff the team has between expense and learners comfort.
It’s probably valuable to explore the AWS console to learn about different services and options. But if you know what you want the CLI is convenient and has been used in some labs.
Here’s a notebook cell you can add to the lab that updates the env file with the postgres endpoint in cloudformation:
stack_name = !aws cloudformation list-stacks --query "StackSummaries[?StackStatus=='CREATE_COMPLETE'].StackName" --output text
stack_name, = stack_name
endpoint = !aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name "$stack_name" --query "Stacks[0].Outputs[?OutputKey=='PostgresEndpoint'].OutputValue" --output text
endpoint, = endpoint
!sed -i -e "s/<RDS-ENDPOINT>/$endpoint/g" ./src/env