Choosing AWS for My Cloud Learning Journey

In my previous post, I wrote about following the Learn to Cloud curriculum. For the hands-on work, I needed to pick a cloud provider: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

I’m anti-GCP, and Azure asked me for an active subscription, so I went with AWS and its Free Tier.

According to the AWS Free Tier FAQ, new customers get $100 in credits when they sign up and can earn up to another $100 by completing activities in the console’s Explore AWS widget. I haven’t looked into those activities yet. For now, I’m mostly interested in EC2 and learning Kubernetes.

Then I looked into Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS’s managed Kubernetes service. Its pricing page lists a fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour for Kubernetes versions under standard support. That’s ten cents per freaking hour just for the control plane, even with no applications deployed. The resources running the applications cost extra.

Leaving a cluster running for 30 days would cost $72 in cluster fees alone. That’s a big chunk of my starting credits. I need to make those credits last, so I’ll have to pay attention to how long I leave resources running.

There’s also a distinction I initially missed: the Free plan lasts up to six months, or until the credits run out, whichever comes first. The credits themselves expire twelve months after account creation, and remaining credits can still be used if I upgrade to the Paid plan. The FAQ explains both timelines.

Six months should be enough time for me to finish the Learn to Cloud curriculum. The challenge is making the credits last that long.