This repository has no cloud account, and none will be created. Creating one requires a payment card and accepts a billing relationship, which is not something a study repository should do on anyone's behalf.
So this file is what you type, with the traps marked. It has never been run here, and nothing in the notes claims an output for it.
The runnable half is 03_iam_and_account.py, which implements and exercises IAM's evaluation algorithm.
Create an IAM user for yourself with AdministratorAccess, and use
that.
Set a budget alarm. Billing → Budgets → a monthly cost budget with an alert at 50%, 80% and 100%. Do this on day one, not after the bill.
Enable Cost Explorer. It takes 24 hours to populate, so turn it on now.
Pick one region and stay in it. Resources in another region are invisible in the console and still bill.
Install and configure the CLI:
aws configure # access key, secret, default region, output format
aws sts get-caller-identity # who am I, really
aws configure list-profiles| Root | IAM user | |
|---|---|---|
| Created by | signing up | you |
| Can | everything, including closing the account | what its policies allow |
| MFA | mandatory, immediately | strongly recommended |
| Daily use | never | yes |
| Recovers | account-level problems only | — |
| Type | Duration | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 12 months free | from signup | 750 h/month t3.micro, 5 GB S3, 750 h RDS |
| Always free | forever | 1 M Lambda requests/month, 25 GB DynamoDB |
| Trials | short, one-off | SageMaker 250 h for 2 months |
Three things bill you anyway, inside the free tier:
t3.small is not a t3.micro.| Concept | AWS | Azure | GCP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Object storage | S3 | Blob Storage | Cloud Storage |
| Block storage | EBS | Managed Disks | Persistent Disk |
| File storage | EFS | Azure Files | Filestore |
| VM | EC2 | Virtual Machines | Compute Engine |
| Managed SQL | RDS | SQL Database | Cloud SQL |
| Warehouse | Redshift | Synapse | BigQuery |
| Serverless functions | Lambda | Functions | Cloud Functions |
| Managed ML | SageMaker | Azure ML | Vertex AI |
| Monitoring | CloudWatch | Monitor | Cloud Monitoring |
| Identity | IAM | Entra ID | IAM |
Learn the row, not the column. Every provider has all of these, and an exam answer that names the concept and gives one vendor's term for it is worth more than a memorised AWS product list.
aws ec2 describe-instances --query \
'Reservations[].Instances[?State.Name==`running`].[InstanceId,InstanceType]'
aws s3 ls
aws sagemaker list-endpointsRun those three at the end of every lab session. Nothing else in this course will save you as much money.