Well, maybe not everyone. suspect that as a new post from a new user, this audience might be pretty limited, to say the least.
With that said, I thought my first post should be with the basics and with that thought in mind, I thought about the free-tier that AWS offers and how it relates to those starting in the cloud field or wanting to setup their own "home-lab" for less in AWS with their free-tier.
If you're new to AWS, there are plenty of services that AWS provides free-tier offerings; if you're starting out, one of the great benefits is 750 hours of a small EC2 Instance class:
Nice. Now what?
I've been starting a WordPress blog since "back in the day," when I was running the IT for a marketing company that hosted websites. So, now we have an instance, great. What I found interesting was the more 'operational focused' free-tier benefits available yearly.
These benefits give new to AWS users a real feel for some of the foundational concepts of cloud operations. This might seem slightly overkill, but the ability to use AWS Systems Manager for this newly provisioned instance to help manage patching and ensure compliance is certainly a nice treat. Check this out, I was surprised to see that Patch Manager was included as "Always Free."
So, we have an EC2 Instance for our new WordPress blog and to top it off, we can even automatically setup patch management with AWS Systems Manager to get a feel for some Cloud Operations focused tasks.
What about serving that new WordPress blog? Cloudfront to the rescue. Cloudfront is AWS CDN service and let's be honest, the free-tier for this is very generous. 1TB of data-transfer out? That's amazing, especially if you're starting out and looking to get your work out there:
So, we have an EC2 Instance, we have a patch-management strategy for it and we even have a global CDN with the free-tier. What else can we do?
Turns out there is much, much more we can take advantage of. Stay tuned for my part II, of "Taking advantage of the free-tier".
