Getting Started - Signing Up for Free Tier
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Getting Started with AWS
The following step-by-step guides cover the basic sign-up and initial configuration of AWS Free Tier. These articles have been produced in response to having read the AWS books, they are so dull, if I can save one person from the boredom it's worth the effort.
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Free Tier provides up to 12 months of free access to most of AWS's services. There's caveats, its not an all-you-can-eat buffet, there's limits to either number of hours or the amount of data that's stored or processed, and not all services are for 12 months.
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Here's a quick summary of what to expect with Free Tier. The 750 hours for an EC2 vm are the total running hours combined for all EC2 instances. Meaning you could have a EC2 instance running 24 * 7 all month or 2 EC2 instances running for 375 hours each or a little over 2 weeks. ​
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Amazon EC2 - 750 Hours per month of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro or t3.micro instance
Amazon S3 - 5 GB on Standard Storage. 20,000 Get Requests 2,000 Put Requests
Amazon RDS - 750 Hours per month. Managed Relational Database Service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or SQL Server.
Amazon DynamoDB - 25 GB of storage, always free. Fast and flexible NoSQL database with seamless scalability.
Amazon SageMaker - 2 Months free trial. Machine learning for every data scientist and developer.
AWS Lambda - 1 Million free requests per month, always free. Compute service that runs your code in response to events.
Amazon Redshift - 2 Month free trial. Fast, simple, cost-effective data warehousing.
Amazon OpenSearch Service - 750 Hours.
Amazon Lightsail - 750 Hours 3 Month Free Trial. Pre-configured cloud resources.
plus over 200 other services.......Further information can be found (here).
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Signing up for Free Tier
Before starting, a mobile phone for verification texts, the Google Authenticator App, an email address and a debit or credit card are required, its free, however, to breach any of the limits and its chargeable. Monitoring usage and costs will be covered in a later article.
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Google 'AWS Free Tier', it's worth taking a look around at the site to get a better idea of what's available under Free Tier.
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Let's crack on and get signed up to AWS.
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On the AWS homepage click on the 'Create a Free Account'.
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Sign Up
Enter you email address to create a Root account, use a long and complex password.
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And enter a AWS Account name and then 'Verify the email address'.
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Verify
Go to your email and copy and paste the AWS verification code in to the verification code box and then click 'Verify'.
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Root Password
Enter a long and complex password, don't reuse a previous password from another site.
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Click on 'Continue (Steps 1 of 5)'.
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Select 'Personal' and complete the remaining fields before continuing.
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Enter the Credit or Debit card details.......
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Lets Verify Again
Select 'Text message (SMS)' and provide a phone number.
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Complete the 'Security check'.
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Enter the verification code sent to your mobile phone.
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Select 'Basic Support - Free'.
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Nearly there
'Click 'Go to the AWS Management Console'.
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First Logon
Select 'Root User', enter the email address used during sign-up.
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Yep. More Verifications
Enter the verification code..... again
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Enter your password and click 'Sign in'.
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Congratulations......
Finally, signed into AWS as the Root user.
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Signing is as Root is a security risk and in the next article the steps to secure the account will be covered.
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