How to create an AWS free tier account
Want to learn more about DevOps and cloud computing? Perhaps you want to pursue an AWS certification. Or maybe you want to host a personal website on S3 or Beanstalk.
Regardless of what the end goal is, the first step into the world of AWS is signing up for a free tier account.
How to create an AWS free tier account
The steps to create an AWS free tier account are quite simple. Just be ready with a credit card, a phone number for verification and an email address for future communications. With those in hand, follow these steps:
- Click the Create Account link on the AWS Management Console's homepage.
- Provide an email address and submit a unique account name.
- Choose to create a personal account, not a business account.
- Submit your home address, credit card and phone number for SMS verification.
- Finally, choose the AWS Free Tier support plan.
Once that's complete, log in to the AWS Management Console and delve into the world of Amazon Web Services.
What's next?
With the world of AWS services at your fingertips, you will be no doubt tempted to provision S3 buckets, deploy a container to ECS, spin up autoscaled EC2 instances or write Lambda functions to run code. However, before getting too deep into the world of AWS, it's recommended that users perform the following functions:
- Enable MFA on the AWS root account to protect against fraudulent access.
- Create a new identity and access management (IAM) user with administrative rights to avoid logging in with the AWS root account.
- Turn on AWS Billing alerts so you are notified if your monthly bill ever exceeds a given threshold.
- Set up an AWS account alias so it's easier for authorized users to log in.
- Grant IAM users access to the billing console to simplify tracking AWS costs.
- Install and configure the AWS CLI.
- Enable the AWS IAM Identity Center to simplify the task of managing users across accounts.
With those foundational steps complete, your AWS free tier account will be secure, protect users from receiving any surprise bills and initiate you into the world of cloud computing.
Cameron McKenzie has been a Java EE software engineer for 20 years. His current specialties include Agile development; DevOps; Spring; and container-based technologies such as Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes.