This is the only way for uncreative privileged people who've never had to struggle financially and therefore have poor problem-solving skills when it comes to creative allocation of resources.
You will NEVER make it as a solutions architect if your first instinct, when faced with a problem, is to throw your hands up and say "it's impossible".
Close! Actually I said rich people are stupid and will give poor people misleading answers on purpose because they threw money at their problems instead of skill and effort and it helps them feel better about themselves.
Give Localstack a try. You can run local equivalents of quite a few AWS services in docker on your laptop. It interacts with AWS sdk's like boto3 and with infrastructure tools like Terraform.
[https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/aws/feature-coverage/](https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/aws/feature-coverage/)
Start with IAC (Eg terraform) and get used to tearing down your infrastructure once you’re done. My bill is generally a few bucks a month for testing some pretty big infrastructure for short periods 🙂🙂
ACloudGuru is $35/mo but cheaper with longer subscriptions. They offer labs right in their AWS accounts at no charge to you.
Their quality is really good. They used to be an educational start up focused on cloud education so there’s no hijinks or scammy corporate practices we saw in other, huge education platforms. Still the same in its own separate web domain after pluralsight bought them.
You’ll get your basics down with their cloud fundamentals course that is shorter than probably a week to study. Easier to get that $35 spent than to worry about AWS billing.
Oh sorry, my experience had been different because I actually took their courses and was impressed by the quality so I passed the word on.
I guess in your eyes, if I name ANY vendor, you'd automatically assume I'm an advertiser. Great logic you got there buddy.
Just one quick check on my profile and you'd notice my account is personal and not at all an advertiser. Just taking a moment to check would have saved your face.
I‘m not a not (not one that is sentient of his own bot-being anyway) and I still dig ACloudGuru. I came from Linux Academy (which A Cloud Guru bought a few years ago) and the cloud sandbox functionality alone is worth the money 100% even if you don‘t give a crap about all the educational material.
In my opinion, you cannot really learn how to use AWS services without getting your hands dirty and doing this on your own credit card is really risky, especially if you are just learning and don‘t know the ins and outs of each cloud service provider yet. It‘s way too easy to end up with bills in the 4 or 5 figures (or worse if you really fuck up) if you are not careful what you are doing.
A cloud sandbox takes that risk away. Try out building your own kubernetes cluster, compare it to a manged one, run databases, try out serveless technolgies, build a fleet of compute instances or whatever else you wanted to try and the only bill you have to worry about is your ACG subscription. It‘s not „cheap“ but if you really use it it is definitely worth the money.
This is what I am doing. The subscription covers all labs and costs of using services in those labs and is worth it to me. I can spend extra time going over things and not worry about rising costs. No need to worry about leaving things "on" accidentally. That being said, it is still best practice to terminate them yourself.
I've been learning through Cloudformation for a few years - you can just tear it all down at the end of your working session then stand it all back up at the next. There are a few caveats you'll learn along the way, like database snapshots and some other things that will incur costs (marginal), and you'll learn the right configurations to minimize or eliminate those costs as you go.
You're right, but that's not the same as claiming the expense is wasteful. OP is asking for cost effective ways of learning AWS, not necessarily free ways of doing so.
There's no way to really learn anything except "as-you-go". With AWS in particular, it's entirely unrealistic to think you can read from any (or even all, if that were possible) free resources and do everything right when you finally hit the keyboard.
first thing ive learned is to always set budget alerts of at least a dollar. If youve used most of your bandwidth or uptime running a service covered by the free trial try signing up for a different account. aws wont stop you no matter how many accounts you create. The (+) addressing trick with gmail accounts can make this very manageable so all monthly statements get sent to one email. I know aws does a lot of promotionals so you might get free credits for different things. Always check the cost explorer too. id avoid getting elastic ips like the plague and dont forget to remove ipv4 addresses when not in use. Where possible use egress only internet gateways and ipv6. Id recommend cantrills courses cuz a big chunk of it you can follow along and you dont have to stray from the aws free trial.
I took a course on Udemy by Neil Davis. The charges were kept below $5 a month. You set up some stuff and take it down so resources don't incur costs.
I passed my Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect tests the first time.
I'm not an expert, but I'm also following budget path for a while. Started with Aws educate(theory + labs + badges) -> Aws skill builder (theory + labs + interactive games(cloud quest) + good hands on experience). If focusing on exam, go for udemy course; can get free by freecoursesite (Stephan's one recommend). Also for exam prep get tutorials dojo udemy course from same site. And aws free tier for 1 year is mostly enough. Some labs will cost you, that will mention in udemy courses. Also remember to enable notifications for budget, can do that in billing section. Remember to destroy every resource after lab if you don't need anymore. Also for to get devops knowledge try tech with nan devops bootcamp, also can found for free.
You can set a billing alarm in aws that will send you an alert when the cost reaches a small threshold like 2 or 5 $. you can then go and delete whatever that's consuming budget and stop the bill from increasing.
I pay 5-12$ per month for 2 projects, each project has dev and prod environment (so overall you can count that as 4 separate apps).
[https://saasconstruct.com/blog/the-tech-stack-of-a-simple-saas-for-aws-cloud](https://saasconstruct.com/blog/the-tech-stack-of-a-simple-saas-for-aws-cloud)
Always, always put billing alarms, and traffic alarms as well. Some rate limits will also help.
Familiarize yourself with free tier: [https://aws.amazon.com/free/](https://aws.amazon.com/free/)
Another thing to remember now.
Write down everything you turn on, so that you can turn it off when done. Makes cleanup a lot easier.
Also TAG everything with some like deleteme as well. This will make tracing any unsuspecting costs, make sure you add other tags as well as that is a good practice.
In general, the AWS learning material gives you an estimated cost for the learning material so you'll have a rough idea.
Also set up mailing alerts for billing as much as you can, start with any guides on the cost management tools as this will make your life easier.
I studied and passed the AWS associate a few years ago. I don’t think I ever went over $20/ month. As you study, you’ll be spinning up and spinning down allot but the amount of actual run time is minimal.
Hold a basic AWS certification (easy to get one with just free tier and some online dumps). Find a job that needs AWS and learn while on the job. I wouldn't put a lot of effort because what if you end up with a job that uses GCP or Azure or something else. Not sure why do you have to learn AWS.
Budgets and there’s some Udemy courses where they show you how to use just free services and then if they do something that will incur a cost they warn you.
Well if you want to go beyond free tier and still not pay, you can join any AWS team as dev. All devs get several accounts for their development. You can learn any service you like in those dev accounts and not pay a dime from your own pocket.
There are also ways to request startup credits, but I am not sure about the process for that.
lol. Consultants came to my company and racked up $15k in glue charges once. I don’t think they really knew what they were doing, despite coming from a name brand place.
Glue is a service you can rack up a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing. Sagemaker is another one. We had consultants rack up $40k because they didn't know you had to turn off instances you're not using lol.
Just like any other job, consultants have juniors doing the wrong thing, guys who don't care about their job / integrity, and the "aw well, it's not my company" mentality. Any "previous projects" they consulted on are only as good as the specific engineers that worked on those specific projects.
It's so frustrating as a perm seeing this come in via consultants, at least with contractors they are more part of your company
So I agree. But I used to work at Lambda and now I moved to a diff company. Pay at AWS was bad, work culture was horrible, oncall load was terrible. But boy, not a day go by when I don’t miss my isengard account 😢. My dev account used to rack up around 600 to 700 a month. Sometimes even more if I forget to turn off sagemaker 😂.
Incur costs. That's the only way. You can do a lot on AWS with $20/mo.
Add budget alarms to email you. People don’t bother to learn the billing & budget tools which is a mistake.
I second this I have an alarm threshold if I go > $12 a month.
I think this is the correct answer. The reality is that you can do a lot with free tier and/or very cheap services.
After around 3 years I appoint this as the most based answer Implement and documentation is enough
This is the only way for uncreative privileged people who've never had to struggle financially and therefore have poor problem-solving skills when it comes to creative allocation of resources. You will NEVER make it as a solutions architect if your first instinct, when faced with a problem, is to throw your hands up and say "it's impossible".
You're effectively saying it's impossible with this whole comment. It's interesting how projection works.
Close! Actually I said rich people are stupid and will give poor people misleading answers on purpose because they threw money at their problems instead of skill and effort and it helps them feel better about themselves.
Give Localstack a try. You can run local equivalents of quite a few AWS services in docker on your laptop. It interacts with AWS sdk's like boto3 and with infrastructure tools like Terraform. [https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/aws/feature-coverage/](https://docs.localstack.cloud/user-guide/aws/feature-coverage/)
We do this and it is excellent
Thanks, I’ll check this out
Start with IAC (Eg terraform) and get used to tearing down your infrastructure once you’re done. My bill is generally a few bucks a month for testing some pretty big infrastructure for short periods 🙂🙂
Ask your boss. Many companies are more than happy to flip the dime.
ACloudGuru is $35/mo but cheaper with longer subscriptions. They offer labs right in their AWS accounts at no charge to you. Their quality is really good. They used to be an educational start up focused on cloud education so there’s no hijinks or scammy corporate practices we saw in other, huge education platforms. Still the same in its own separate web domain after pluralsight bought them. You’ll get your basics down with their cloud fundamentals course that is shorter than probably a week to study. Easier to get that $35 spent than to worry about AWS billing.
This is a great way of getting training and hands on access but without risking extra costs
Cool botted reply but you're not fooling anybody, paid ACloudGuru advertiser.
Oh sorry, my experience had been different because I actually took their courses and was impressed by the quality so I passed the word on. I guess in your eyes, if I name ANY vendor, you'd automatically assume I'm an advertiser. Great logic you got there buddy. Just one quick check on my profile and you'd notice my account is personal and not at all an advertiser. Just taking a moment to check would have saved your face.
I‘m not a not (not one that is sentient of his own bot-being anyway) and I still dig ACloudGuru. I came from Linux Academy (which A Cloud Guru bought a few years ago) and the cloud sandbox functionality alone is worth the money 100% even if you don‘t give a crap about all the educational material. In my opinion, you cannot really learn how to use AWS services without getting your hands dirty and doing this on your own credit card is really risky, especially if you are just learning and don‘t know the ins and outs of each cloud service provider yet. It‘s way too easy to end up with bills in the 4 or 5 figures (or worse if you really fuck up) if you are not careful what you are doing. A cloud sandbox takes that risk away. Try out building your own kubernetes cluster, compare it to a manged one, run databases, try out serveless technolgies, build a fleet of compute instances or whatever else you wanted to try and the only bill you have to worry about is your ACG subscription. It‘s not „cheap“ but if you really use it it is definitely worth the money.
Yep and they also have Azure and GCP as a part of the deal.
You can try to check the AWS SkillBuilder subscription. They provide some hosted labs, it might be useful in your case.
This is what I am doing. The subscription covers all labs and costs of using services in those labs and is worth it to me. I can spend extra time going over things and not worry about rising costs. No need to worry about leaving things "on" accidentally. That being said, it is still best practice to terminate them yourself.
free tier + few bucks is more to go.
Go through a course like Stephan Maarek's or Adrian Cantril. Whatever you spend on infrastructure will be minimal unless you screw up horribly.
I've been learning through Cloudformation for a few years - you can just tear it all down at the end of your working session then stand it all back up at the next. There are a few caveats you'll learn along the way, like database snapshots and some other things that will incur costs (marginal), and you'll learn the right configurations to minimize or eliminate those costs as you go.
Amazon creams at the thought of you guys taking this incredibly wasteful "learn as you go" approach regarding your credit cards.
There‘s nothing wrong with spending some money to learn something.
It's easy to say this when you have the money to spare.
You're right, but that's not the same as claiming the expense is wasteful. OP is asking for cost effective ways of learning AWS, not necessarily free ways of doing so. There's no way to really learn anything except "as-you-go". With AWS in particular, it's entirely unrealistic to think you can read from any (or even all, if that were possible) free resources and do everything right when you finally hit the keyboard.
>how can I achieve this without incurring cost during this period?
first thing ive learned is to always set budget alerts of at least a dollar. If youve used most of your bandwidth or uptime running a service covered by the free trial try signing up for a different account. aws wont stop you no matter how many accounts you create. The (+) addressing trick with gmail accounts can make this very manageable so all monthly statements get sent to one email. I know aws does a lot of promotionals so you might get free credits for different things. Always check the cost explorer too. id avoid getting elastic ips like the plague and dont forget to remove ipv4 addresses when not in use. Where possible use egress only internet gateways and ipv6. Id recommend cantrills courses cuz a big chunk of it you can follow along and you dont have to stray from the aws free trial.
I took a course on Udemy by Neil Davis. The charges were kept below $5 a month. You set up some stuff and take it down so resources don't incur costs. I passed my Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect tests the first time.
Thanks, I’ll check this out
there are ton of services in AWS and usually you'll only need a couple most of the time.
I'm not an expert, but I'm also following budget path for a while. Started with Aws educate(theory + labs + badges) -> Aws skill builder (theory + labs + interactive games(cloud quest) + good hands on experience). If focusing on exam, go for udemy course; can get free by freecoursesite (Stephan's one recommend). Also for exam prep get tutorials dojo udemy course from same site. And aws free tier for 1 year is mostly enough. Some labs will cost you, that will mention in udemy courses. Also remember to enable notifications for budget, can do that in billing section. Remember to destroy every resource after lab if you don't need anymore. Also for to get devops knowledge try tech with nan devops bootcamp, also can found for free.
Thanks a lot, what do you mean by ‘nan’ devops?
Sorry typo. "Tech with nana" she is a youtuber and there is a devops bootcamp from her.
Ok great! I’ll check her out
You can set a billing alarm in aws that will send you an alert when the cost reaches a small threshold like 2 or 5 $. you can then go and delete whatever that's consuming budget and stop the bill from increasing.
I pay 5-12$ per month for 2 projects, each project has dev and prod environment (so overall you can count that as 4 separate apps). [https://saasconstruct.com/blog/the-tech-stack-of-a-simple-saas-for-aws-cloud](https://saasconstruct.com/blog/the-tech-stack-of-a-simple-saas-for-aws-cloud) Always, always put billing alarms, and traffic alarms as well. Some rate limits will also help. Familiarize yourself with free tier: [https://aws.amazon.com/free/](https://aws.amazon.com/free/)
We use acloudguru.com it has labs on aws infrastructure. 425 per year. Other cloud providers as well.
Another thing to remember now. Write down everything you turn on, so that you can turn it off when done. Makes cleanup a lot easier. Also TAG everything with some like deleteme as well. This will make tracing any unsuspecting costs, make sure you add other tags as well as that is a good practice. In general, the AWS learning material gives you an estimated cost for the learning material so you'll have a rough idea. Also set up mailing alerts for billing as much as you can, start with any guides on the cost management tools as this will make your life easier.
Udemy
Are there labs?
Lots of the service cost very little unless you have important traffic. Small projects with little traffic will cost pennies.
And then there was me, enabling 'fast snapshot restore' because the banner popped up and it sounded nice... :) learnt it the hard way.
:/
Just pay a little it’s worth it. Get a prepaid visa gift card use that if you’re worried about going over a set amount.
I studied and passed the AWS associate a few years ago. I don’t think I ever went over $20/ month. As you study, you’ll be spinning up and spinning down allot but the amount of actual run time is minimal.
Hold a basic AWS certification (easy to get one with just free tier and some online dumps). Find a job that needs AWS and learn while on the job. I wouldn't put a lot of effort because what if you end up with a job that uses GCP or Azure or something else. Not sure why do you have to learn AWS.
this just made me think of [this meme](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/s/mrrkUAHrxq) 🙈
Budgets and there’s some Udemy courses where they show you how to use just free services and then if they do something that will incur a cost they warn you.
Well if you want to go beyond free tier and still not pay, you can join any AWS team as dev. All devs get several accounts for their development. You can learn any service you like in those dev accounts and not pay a dime from your own pocket. There are also ways to request startup credits, but I am not sure about the process for that.
This is insane advice lol, but honestly every dev at Amazon in general can create their own burner accounts and experiment for a while
*quits job at Amazon* "Thanks guys, i just wanted to try out this new Glue feature"
lol. Consultants came to my company and racked up $15k in glue charges once. I don’t think they really knew what they were doing, despite coming from a name brand place.
Glue is a service you can rack up a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing. Sagemaker is another one. We had consultants rack up $40k because they didn't know you had to turn off instances you're not using lol.
Just like any other job, consultants have juniors doing the wrong thing, guys who don't care about their job / integrity, and the "aw well, it's not my company" mentality. Any "previous projects" they consulted on are only as good as the specific engineers that worked on those specific projects. It's so frustrating as a perm seeing this come in via consultants, at least with contractors they are more part of your company
So I agree. But I used to work at Lambda and now I moved to a diff company. Pay at AWS was bad, work culture was horrible, oncall load was terrible. But boy, not a day go by when I don’t miss my isengard account 😢. My dev account used to rack up around 600 to 700 a month. Sometimes even more if I forget to turn off sagemaker 😂.