Should You Use AWS Cloud Sandbox Environments?!

As a cloud beginner looking to improve your tech skills, you might think that you need to pay for a cloud sandbox environment to practise your labs because you’ve heard horror stories about people accidentally leaving cloud services running and racking up thousands of dollars in cloud fees.

But what if I told you that you could actually end up paying more by getting a sandbox account, than if you just created your project directly on AWS.

But even more important than that, what if I told you that working in these sandbox environments are actually stopping you from becoming a better cloud engineer which is in turn stopping you from getting that cloud job?

For those who might not know, Cloud Sandboxes are third party software that can simulate a real cloud console, for example a cloud sandbox where you can deploy AWS resources EC2 instances, RDS, Load balancers and more without actually doing it in the AWS console. These environments help you build and test infrastructure for educational purposes.

I’ve noticed that a lot of bootcamps and courses train their students to use these sandbox environments, but I am now going to give you two reasons why I think learning with these sandbox accounts are actually a terrible idea.

The first reason is that using these sandbox accounts might work out to be more expensive than simply deploying your infrastructure directly on the cloud and here’s why.

Most of the cloud sandbox environments I’ve seen usually cost between $15-$30 per month. 

Let’s assume you want to create some AWS labs, for example, spin up some S3 buckets or do some work with EC2. If you decide to go for the highest $30 tier for a sandbox account for 3 months you end up paying $90.

But what if I told you that you could simply create an AWS account and do the exact same labs and it would cost you $0.

This is because AWS has a very generous free tier which means that you could spin up the most commonly used AWS services and create projects with them for absolutely free!

But look, I totally understand the fear of making the wrong move and racking up thousands of dollars in cloud bills, which is why I’m now going to walk you throughwhat you can do to make sure you never receive a surprise cloud bill.

Have you heard of a service called AWS Budgets?

AWS Budgets is the simplest way to monitor your AWS spend and be alerted when you exceed or are forecasted 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 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.

Let me give you an example so you understand what I'm saying.  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.

The students in my cloud career acceleration program create high quality cloud projects directly in their AWS account. 

We don’t use Sandboxes and by using AWS budgets their total cloud bill never gets above $10. You can compare this approach to those using Sandbox accounts that will charge you $90 over the course of 3 months. This is an example of how fear and trying to save money can actually end up costing you more money.

The second reason I don’t recommend cloud sandbox accounts is because they might be harming your confidence and stopping you from developing into a more competent cloud engineer.

I’ll share a story to illuminate this point

A cloud beginner wanted to join my training program and so I asked them a couple of questions to see where their skill level was. They told me that they had done a lot of labs in sandbox accounts, so I gave them what I thought would be a simple task. 

I asked them to open up their AWS account and create a simple webserver. This is the kind of task that you might be asked in a technical interview for a cloud role so I thought it would be a good test for them because they had mentioned that they had done a lot of labs.

I noticed that they immediately got nervous when they signed in to their AWS account and seemed really confused. 

They struggled to use the AWS console and were really nervous to click the buttons needed to create the EC2 instance.

Long story short they failed this task.

The reason they were so nervous is because they had never actually deployed any real infrastructure in a real AWS account before.

Look, if you want to learn to drive a car and get your driver's licence you need to have hours of practice driving a real car on real roads. I believe it’s the same if you want to break into the cloud industry, you need to create real cloud projects in real cloud environments.

Will you make some mistakes in the process? Yes, but guess what, the mistakes are a big part of the learning process. As long as you have guardrails in place like AWS Budgets you’ll be absolutely fine

The problem when you use these simulated sandbox accounts is that everything works perfectly first time and so you never learn how to troubleshoot, and guess what, when you work in the cloud industry things don’t work half the time, that’s what you’re getting paid for, to troubleshoot and figure this out.

It’s really difficult to build this troubleshooting muscle in a sandbox environment

So if you want to save money whilst also building confidence in your technical skills and abilities then I highly recommend you stay away from sandbox accounts and build real infrastructure using real AWS accounts. Just make sure you set up AWS Budgets first to avoid any nasty billing surprises.

Now remember, all of this is just advice and you can learn in whatever way that works for you. If you feel sandbox accounts are good, then go for it. I just wanted to bring a different perspective that you might not have thought of.

If you are tired of jumping from one tutorial to another without making progress and want to follow a program that helps you achieve your dreams of breaking into the cloud industry by providing high quality cloud projects and mentorship, then check out what we have to offer at cloudcareermentor.com