Okay, Day 2 of my "All-in on AWS" journey.
Yesterday, I promised I would start building. But before I spin up a single server, I need to protect my account.
I actually got lucky and started with $100 in promotional credits (nice surprise!). But I’m not letting that make me lazy. I want those credits to go towards learning cool AI services later this week, not paying for an idle server I forgot to turn off.
So, today’s lab was simple: Set up an AWS Budget to alert me if I spend more than $0.01.
Here is how I did it.
The "Zero Spend" Strategy
Step 1: Find the Budgets Section I went to the "Billing and Cost Management" dashboard. On the left sidebar, there is a clear option for "Budgets".
Step 2: Create the Budget I clicked on "Create budget". AWS offers a "Zero spend budget" template. It basically says: "If my account spends a penny, email me."
Step 3: Add Recipients I added my personal email and hit confirm.
It took me literally 3 minutes. Now, even with my credit buffer, I have peace of mind. If I accidentally leave a resource running, I’ll know within a few hours.
Why this matters It might seem boring compared to training an AI model. But setting this up gives me the confidence to experiment. Now I can click buttons in the console with a little less fear.
If you are new like me, stop what you are doing. Go set up a budget.
Tomorrow, we build something real (a website!). Stay tuned.
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