Set up your AWS account securely, enable Free Tier, configure billing alerts, and establish root account security.
Setting Up Your AWS Account
Before designing architectures, you need a working AWS account. The AWS Free Tier lets you learn and experiment at zero cost for 12 months.
Teacher Note: The Free Tier is like a gym trial membership. You get access to real equipment (real AWS services), just with usage limits. Stay within limits and pay nothing. Go over and AWS charges you. Set a billing alert BEFORE experimenting!
Free Tier Categories
| Type | Duration | Example |
|---|
| 12-Month Free | First 12 months after signup | 750 hrs EC2 t2.micro/month, 5GB S3, 25GB DynamoDB |
| Always Free | Forever, no expiry | 1 million Lambda invocations/month, 25 CloudWatch metrics |
| Free Trial | Short-term trial of specific service | 2 months of SageMaker Studio Lab |
Account Security Checklist — Do This IMMEDIATELY
- Enable MFA on root account — use an authenticator app, not SMS
- Create an IAM admin user — NEVER use root for daily tasks
- Set a billing alarm at $10 — get emailed if you accidentally spend money
- Enable AWS Cost Explorer — see spending visually
- Turn on CloudTrail — audit trail for all API calls
- Review the default VPC — understand what exists before creating resources
# Set billing alarm immediately after account creation
# CloudWatch --> Alarms --> Create Alarm --> Billing --> Total Estimated Charge
# Threshold: Greater than $10 --> Send email to your address
# This prevents surprise bills while learning!
Exam Tip: The exam does NOT test account creation steps. But understanding the Free Tier helps you know which services are available for practice. Always use us-east-1 for learning — it has all services and is cheapest.