Intro:
I'm pretty sure the term DevOps is in your to-do or doing list, topics such as kubernetes, containers, serverless and CI-CD are common skills requested for open possitions or in your day to day work environment, after sign up for any of the cloud providers I think you should pay attentions to these steps: how to get founded and how to set a budget.
Get Founded:
The fact is you will need to invest time and effort during your first steps, of course, this include the use of a series of services from your cloud providers, please take a in count that additional objects will be created during your exercises (network gateways for example) and for that you will need founds, please consider the bellow alternatives:
Use your @edu domain email account: cloud providers have either special discounts or free tier for active students, in the case of Microsoft Azure you have $100 if you have a Github Student Pack subscription; about Amazon AWS I understand they still have a free tier for students, in both cases using free tier has its limitations but it is a good starting point, feel free to get more details from the official documentation.
Get credits from your local / online meetup groups: in the case of AWS this has been very effective for me, I take part of online sessions or meetups from AWS Ambassadors, in the most of the meetings at the end there are rafles where you can participate and win credits ($25, $50, etc) so you can redeem it in your AWS Account, give it a try, you never know when you can win.
Use your own debit/credit card: of course if you want to get right to the point you can use your debit/credit card, just remember the first steps require more time and eventually that means more money.
Indepent of what of the above options you choose please don't forget to remove any services you were working on it, this is means: clusters, VMs, deployed functions or any other assets, also, double check additional objects created during your exercises, as an example: after delete a cluster deployed on AWS EKS at the next day I still have charges related and this was because a VPC Gateway was up and running.
Set a Budget:
As you can imagine, it is very important to monitor the use of the founds we have related to our account, for that reason, each cloud provider has its own method to do run this task, just take in count setting up a budget works like a forecast__, this means, the budget is not a speed limit, you can pass it and it's our responsibility to monitor it from time to time; in simple terms: we are in charge to take care of out credits.
All right, bellow you will find a couple of snapshots related to the process of how to set a budget in Azure and AWS:
Setting up a budget in Azure
From your Azure dashboard please search for an option called "budgets":
After that set the requested info from the budget,in the bellow image you can find an example of my personal budget:
As a final step you have to set at least one email address to receive any alert related to your forecast:
Eventually you will receive emails like this one:
As you can see the forecast is higher than the expected, this means I should review what services I have deployed and take the decission to shut them down or continue as they are, the budget is not a tool to auto block something.
As a final comment, every time you log in Azure gives you insight like remaining credits and a cost by resouce just like in the next image:
Now it's your turn: let's try to set a budget and an alert on Azure, then try to deploy an asset and you'll see if there is a relation between your forecast and your budget.
In the next I'll show you how to set a budget in AWS. Happy coding!
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