Arm the tripwires before anything expensive can happen. This lab is short and completely non-optional — nothing else in the course runs until it's done.
1. Budgets (30 min)
- Billing console → Budgets → create budget:
early-warning— $5/month, cost budget, alerts at 50%, 80%, and 100% of forecasted spend, emailed to an address you actually read.something-is-wrong— $20/month, same alert structure. If this one ever fires during this course, you stop and investigate that day.
- Confirm both alert emails arrive (check the subscription confirmations).
2. Cost Explorer (20 min)
- Enable Cost Explorer (takes up to 24h to fully populate — that's why we do it in Week 1).
- Tour the views: monthly costs by service, by Region, daily granularity. Right now it's near-zero and boring. Good — memorize what boring looks like; your weekly homework is noticing when it stops being boring.
- Find the Free Tier usage page: see your allowances and current burn. Bookmark it.
3. The Free Tier quiz (with your buddy, 20 min)
Answer from the Free Tier page, not memory — the point is knowing where to look:
- How many EC2 micro-instance hours per month are free — and is that per instance or per account?
- Is a NAT Gateway ever free? An Elastic IP sitting unattached?
- What happens on month 13?
- Your instance is stopped (not terminated) — what still bills? (EBS storage. Write that one down.)
4. Set your weekly ritual
Calendar reminder, same day each week, all 12 weeks: open Cost Explorer, explain every line to yourself, check Free Tier usage. Two minutes that prevent every horror story your instructor will tell you this Friday.
Deliverable
Screenshots of both budgets with confirmed email alerts + your Free Tier quiz answers. This lab gates the rest of the course — no billing alarms, no Week 3 servers.