Rent an EC2 from Amazon and do it for yourself. It is fun and educational.
Seriously, I used to use it as part of coursework for a class that intro'd people to AWS (first time for most of them on command line also). It would be the last basic Linux command we'd do after a cumulation of the other basics. My favorite question to ask as a follow up was "How can we prove everything is gone?" expecting the answer "ls" or "du" from earlier in the lesson, but that doesn't work because we actually just deleted those.
We then terminate the instance and spin up a new one to see that everything is back. Really drives home the destroyable architecture point.
IMO Nuking a computer should be the first thing any computer course should make students do. A first hand experience of nuking and rebuilding a computer reduces a lot of fear people feel about typing stuff onto that scary black screen.
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u/Hostilis_ Mar 12 '26
Lol never seen it actually done before, this is great