How To Practice On AWS Without Going Broke

Worried about receiving an unexpectedly large bill while practicing projects on AWS?

If you’re a cloud beginner, then there is a chance that you make the wrong move, which could cost you hundreds of dollars in AWS bills.

We’ve all seen that meme where you have one guy sitting next to a homeless-looking guy and he asks him, how did you end up in poverty? By gambling? Drugs? And the homeless-looking guy responds, “No, I left an EC2 instance on.”

Now obviously, this is very tongue in cheek and you are probably not going to end up being homeless from leaving an EC2 instance on

 I am going to walk you through the 3 strategies you can take to make sure you don’t get hit with any unexpected cloud bills.

To avoid getting a large cloud bill it is important to make sure you have adequate monitoring in place so you are alerted when your bill is starting to creep up beyond a predetermined threshold.

This is why the first thing I recommend cloud beginners do in their AWS accounts is set up AWS budgets.

AWS Budgets is the simplest way to monitor your AWS spend and be alerted when you exceed or are forecast to exceed your desired spending limit.

With AWS Budgets, you can set up a monthly cost budget with a fixed target amount to track all costs associated with your account. 

This means that you can set a monthly budget of any amount, for example, $10, which means that you will be notified once your AWS bills reaches $10 so that you can look into your account to make any changes you need to stop your bill rising further

But what if $10 is the absolute maximum you want to spend on AWS, which means that you want to be notified before your bill reaches $10?

Well AWS Budgets allows you to track a variable target amount too, which means that you will receive a notification when your bill is at a specified percentage of the threshold.

To clarify that statement,  let’s assume your threshold is still $10, but you want to be notified when your bill is 60% of $10. You can specify that in AWS budget, which means that when your bill hits $6, you will be notified. $6 being 60% of $10.

This is one of the best features for keeping track of your costs on AWS and I recommend you implement it right now on your AWS account if you haven't already.

AWS has a generous Free Tier which means that you can practice and play around with various AWS services without paying a single cent. And by understanding how the free tier works you can save a lot of money on cloud bills.

To find out more about the free tier services all you need to do is go to https://aws.amazon.com/free and scroll down to see that there are 3 types of free tier services.

The first option is the Free Trial option where you can use the service for free for a limited time option.

These free tier offers are short term trial offers that start from the time of first usage begins. Once the trial period expires you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).

For example, you can use Sage maker for free for 2 months, Or Amazon Redshift for two months

The second option includes services where you get 12 months free.

These free tier offers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your 12 month free usage term expires or if your application use exceeds the tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates

The third option in the Free Tier is the Always Free option

These free tier offers do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term, but are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely.

Some examples include Amazon DynamoDB, where you always get 25 GB of free storage.

Another really good example is that you get 1 million free Lambda requests per month which means that a lot of companies don’t end up paying for the Lambda service because their monthly requests are way below this threshold

I would really encourage you to get familiar with the Free Tier because it could literally save you hundreds of dollars

The final way to save money while practising on AWS is a method that is really obvious but is also something I see a lot of cloud beginners forget to do.

A lot of AWS services, like EC2 and RDS, are billed on an on-demand basis which means that you only get charged when the services are actually running.

This means that the best way to reduce your bill is simply by stopping the services when they are not in use.

I see a lot of cloud beginners create EC2 or RDS instances to test something and then forget to turn them off after they are done, so these instances run in the background, quietly increasing the monthly bill.

By simply building up the habit of stopping instances that are not in use, it will help to significantly reduce your cloud bill.

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