Getting Started with AWS: Keeping the “Free Tier” Free

Prevent Charges by Monitoring Your Usage

When learning how to use “The Cloud”, unexpected charges are a right of passage, even using the “Free Tier”. We have experienced this ourselves and we’ve seen it happen to most of our students. In this article we are going to help enlightened newcomers avoid paying for their mistakes.

Why is this an issue?

You would think that “Free Tier” means you will not pay money. This isn’t the case. By design, the cloud allows you consume any amount of resources that you request. The dark side of this, is if you request more than your free allotment, you will pay for it. The Free Tier only stays free if you stay under the usage limits that AWS lays out for you. If you exceed these limits, you will be charged according to their billing schedule.

The justification of this is CapEx vs OpEx. The whole point of the cloud is that you get what you ask for. If you want to consume more resources that you are given for free, you are able to do so, but you will be charged.

However, there should at least be the option to let you kill all services once you hit the free tier limit to prevent any charges. This is a feature that users have been asking for over a decade.

Before you plunge into AWS, you need to understand key billing concepts and construct a safety net.

#aws #software-development #free tier

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Getting Started with AWS: Keeping the “Free Tier” Free

Prevent Charges by Monitoring Your Usage

When learning how to use “The Cloud”, unexpected charges are a right of passage, even using the “Free Tier”. We have experienced this ourselves and we’ve seen it happen to most of our students. In this article we are going to help enlightened newcomers avoid paying for their mistakes.

Why is this an issue?

You would think that “Free Tier” means you will not pay money. This isn’t the case. By design, the cloud allows you consume any amount of resources that you request. The dark side of this, is if you request more than your free allotment, you will pay for it. The Free Tier only stays free if you stay under the usage limits that AWS lays out for you. If you exceed these limits, you will be charged according to their billing schedule.

The justification of this is CapEx vs OpEx. The whole point of the cloud is that you get what you ask for. If you want to consume more resources that you are given for free, you are able to do so, but you will be charged.

However, there should at least be the option to let you kill all services once you hit the free tier limit to prevent any charges. This is a feature that users have been asking for over a decade.

Before you plunge into AWS, you need to understand key billing concepts and construct a safety net.

#aws #software-development #free tier

5 Hands-On Tutorials to Jump-Start AWS Free Tier

A couple of months ago, I finished an entire online video course for AWS Developers Associate certification and have read a few whitepapers since then as a personal commitment to learning Amazon’s cloud computing platform. But if I am going to be serious about getting a certificate, I still need to do a lot of hands-on. I finally managed to get myself a free tier account and with all the information I have gotten so far, I am confused how and where to start.

I picked a random tutorial, hence my first one was the Breaking a Monolith Application into Microservices hands-on and felt that I am getting ahead of myself after finishing it. For someone who is completely new to AWS, here are 5 recommended hands-on tutorials so that one will have a better familiarity with the fundamentals.

#aws #aws free tier #aws tutorials

AWS Cost Allocation Tags and Cost Reduction

Bob had just arrived in the office for his first day of work as the newly hired chief technical officer when he was called into a conference room by the president, Martha, who immediately introduced him to the head of accounting, Amanda. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Martha got right down to business:

“Bob, we have several teams here developing software applications on Amazon and our bill is very high. We think it’s unnecessarily high, and we’d like you to look into it and bring it under control.”

Martha placed a screenshot of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing report on the table and pointed to it.

“This is a problem for us: We don’t know what we’re spending this money on, and we need to see more detail.”

Amanda chimed in, “Bob, look, we have financial dimensions that we use for reporting purposes, and I can provide you with some guidance regarding some information we’d really like to see such that the reports that are ultimately produced mirror these dimensions — if you can do this, it would really help us internally.”

“Bob, we can’t stress how important this is right now. These projects are becoming very expensive for our business,” Martha reiterated.

“How many projects do we have?” Bob inquired.

“We have four projects in total: two in the aviation division and two in the energy division. If it matters, the aviation division has 75 developers and the energy division has 25 developers,” the CEO responded.

Bob understood the problem and responded, “I’ll see what I can do and have some ideas. I might not be able to give you retrospective insight, but going forward, we should be able to get a better idea of what’s going on and start to bring the cost down.”

The meeting ended with Bob heading to find his desk. Cost allocation tags should help us, he thought to himself as he looked for someone who might know where his office is.

#aws #aws cloud #node js #cost optimization #aws cli #well architected framework #aws cost report #cost control #aws cost #aws tags

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How To Unite AWS KMS with Serverless Application Model (SAM)

The Basics

AWS KMS is a Key Management Service that let you create Cryptographic keys that you can use to encrypt and decrypt data and also other keys. You can read more about it here.

Important points about Keys

Please note that the customer master keys(CMK) generated can only be used to encrypt small amount of data like passwords, RSA key. You can use AWS KMS CMKs to generate, encrypt, and decrypt data keys. However, AWS KMS does not store, manage, or track your data keys, or perform cryptographic operations with data keys.

You must use and manage data keys outside of AWS KMS. KMS API uses AWS KMS CMK in the encryption operations and they cannot accept more than 4 KB (4096 bytes) of data. To encrypt application data, use the server-side encryption features of an AWS service, or a client-side encryption library, such as the AWS Encryption SDK or the Amazon S3 encryption client.

Scenario

We want to create signup and login forms for a website.

Passwords should be encrypted and stored in DynamoDB database.

What do we need?

1. KMS key to encrypt and decrypt data
2. DynamoDB table to store password.
3. Lambda functions & APIs to process Login and Sign up forms.
4. Sign up/ Login forms in HTML.

Lets Implement it as Serverless Application Model (SAM)!

Lets first create the Key that we will use to encrypt and decrypt password.

KmsKey:
    Type: AWS::KMS::Key
    Properties: 
      Description: CMK for encrypting and decrypting
      KeyPolicy:
        Version: '2012-10-17'
        Id: key-default-1
        Statement:
        - Sid: Enable IAM User Permissions
          Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            AWS: !Sub arn:aws:iam::${AWS::AccountId}:root
          Action: kms:*
          Resource: '*'
        - Sid: Allow administration of the key
          Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            AWS: !Sub arn:aws:iam::${AWS::AccountId}:user/${KeyAdmin}
          Action:
          - kms:Create*
          - kms:Describe*
          - kms:Enable*
          - kms:List*
          - kms:Put*
          - kms:Update*
          - kms:Revoke*
          - kms:Disable*
          - kms:Get*
          - kms:Delete*
          - kms:ScheduleKeyDeletion
          - kms:CancelKeyDeletion
          Resource: '*'
        - Sid: Allow use of the key
          Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            AWS: !Sub arn:aws:iam::${AWS::AccountId}:user/${KeyUser}
          Action:
          - kms:DescribeKey
          - kms:Encrypt
          - kms:Decrypt
          - kms:ReEncrypt*
          - kms:GenerateDataKey
          - kms:GenerateDataKeyWithoutPlaintext
          Resource: '*'

The important thing in above snippet is the KeyPolicy. KMS requires a Key Administrator and Key User. As a best practice your Key Administrator and Key User should be 2 separate user in your Organisation. We are allowing all permissions to the root users.

So if your key Administrator leaves the organisation, the root user will be able to delete this key. As you can see **KeyAdmin **can manage the key but not use it and KeyUser can only use the key. ${KeyAdmin} and **${KeyUser} **are parameters in the SAM template.

You would be asked to provide values for these parameters during SAM Deploy.

#aws #serverless #aws-sam #aws-key-management-service #aws-certification #aws-api-gateway #tutorial-for-beginners #aws-blogs