AWS provides a ton of solutions/services to cater for most, if not all, of the challenges you are trying to solve. I will categorize some of the essential services that you can start playing around with immediately! AWS offers over 200 services; while almost impossible to cover all of them, it is a good idea to browse through these services and explore as you might end up needing them in the future.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Compute

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

IaaS Storage

• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
• Elastic File System (EFS)

Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS)

1. Relational Database Service (RDS) includes all your favorite Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Aurora (AWS optimized relational database)

2. NoSQL Databases: DynamoDB, DocumentDB

3. In-memory Databases: Memcached, Redis

4. Big-data databases: Amazon Redshift

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

1. User Authentication: Cognito
2. Mobile Services: API Gateway, AppSync, Amplify
3. Machine Learning: SageMaker
4. Internet of Things (IoT): IoT Core, Amazon Free RTOS

There are of course, many more services that I have not mentioned. Services suited for DevOps, Security, Networking, and many more. But we will better understand these services by diving in and using them.

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Set up a Billing Alarm

While provisioning resources in AWS, it is advisable to keep track of all the services you instantiate. Terminate/delete services and/or instances that you are not using to avoid extra costs.

One popular way of ensuring costs don't get out of hand is by setting up a billing alarm. This allows you to get a notification either via an SMS or email, whenever incurred costs reach a certain threshold.

Log into your AWS Console using an IAM Account with Admin Policies. If you aren't familiar with this, refer to this article.

Once in the Console, search for billing in the search bar, and click on the first option.

On the Billing Dashboard, click on Billing Preferences on the side-nav and check Receive PDF, as well as Receive Free Tier Usage. Then Click on Save. My Billing Dashboard might look different from yours as I have been running multiple services for a while now.

Now click on the Manage Billing Alerts blue link. This will take you to another AWS Service called CloudWatch on a new tab.

Again, don't be intimidated by the scary dashboards in AWS you'll get used to them soon enough.

Go to All Alarms then Click Create Alarm

Click on Select Metric.

Then Billing

Select Total Estimated Charge

In my case, I have set the condition to Greater than or Equal to 5 dollars

Once this condition is met, the alarm is raised/triggered. We now have to attach this alarm to another AWS Service called Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) so that we can get the Alert as SMS or email.

You can experiment with various conditions and get to pick one that works for you.

Select Create new Topic , Give the topic a name, and fill in your email address in the appropriate field. You will need to open your email and click on a link sent to you by AWS to activate the email to receive alerts.

After clicking Create Topic , AWS auto-selects the new topic as you can see above.

Give your Alarm a name.

Finally Review your Alarm and press the button: Create Alarm.

Click Billing Alarms on the side-nav to view your newly created alarm.

Congratulations!!! You have not only created a billing alarm, but also interacted with various AWS Services already. From Cloudwatch, SNS and even IAM; you are on the path to being an AWS cloud practitioner! Keep Learning.

To learn more advanced Cost Saving Techniques, read this article to learn all about setting up budgets and cost forecasting on AWS: How to NOT melt your Credit Card on AWS