Time to get hands-on. Today: how to create an AWS Free Tier account, plus a quick Q&A recap covering everything from Days 9-11.
How to Create an AWS Free Tier Account
- Go to aws.amazon.com and click "Create an AWS Account"
- Enter your email address and choose an AWS account name
- Verify your email with the confirmation code sent to you
- Set a strong root password for your account
- Enter your contact information (name, phone number, address)
- Enter payment information — a valid credit/debit card is required even for free tier usage, mainly for identity verification
- Complete phone number verification via SMS or call
- Choose a support plan — select the Basic Support (Free) plan
- Your account is created, and you're taken to the AWS Management Console
Q&A Recap — Days 9-11
Q: What is AWS?
A: A secure cloud service platform offering compute, database, storage, and other resources to help businesses scale.
Q: How many services does AWS provide?
A: 175+.
Q: What is an AWS Region?
A: A separate geographic area containing a set of Availability Zones.
Q: How many Regions does AWS currently have?
A: 34.
Q: Do Regions communicate with each other by default?
A: No — only if required/configured.
Q: What is an Availability Zone (AZ)?
A: A data center (or group of data centers) within a Region.
Q: What gives each AZ independent reliability?
A: Independent power supply, cooling system, and physical security.
Q: What are Local Zones used for?
A: Deploying workloads needing single-digit millisecond latency, closer to population centers without a full Region.
Q: What does AWS Direct Connect provide?
A: A private, dedicated network connection between AWS and your own datacenter/office.
Q: What are POP (Points of Presence) locations used for?
A: Caching content closer to end users, powering Amazon CloudFront's low-latency delivery.
Q: What is Elasticity?
A: Increasing or decreasing the number of servers based on load — short-term, achieved via Auto Scaling.
Q: What is Scalability?
A: Increasing the capacity of a single server — long-term, achieved by changing instance type.
Q: What is Elasticity also called?
A: Horizontal Scaling.
Q: What is Scalability also called?
A: Vertical Scaling.
Q: What are the three pillars of High Availability?
A: Redundancy, Monitoring, and Failover.
Q: How often does a Load Balancer perform health checks?
A: Every 30 seconds.
Q: What does AWS Elastic Beanstalk represent in terms of service model?
A: PaaS — you upload your app, and AWS handles the rest.
Q: What does EC2 represent in terms of service model?
A: IaaS — you manage most of the setup yourself.
Q: Name three AWS Compute services.
A: EC2, Auto Scaling, Lambda.
Q: Name three AWS Storage services.
A: S3, EBS, S3 Glacier.
Q: Name three AWS Database services.
A: RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora.
Q: What does AWS IAM manage?
A: Secure access to AWS services and resources.
Q: What are the three ways to access AWS resources?
A: AWS CLI, Management Console, and SDKs.
Where to read & follow
- GitHub: https://github.com/sr-palatasingh/AWS-DevOps-Blog/tree/main/posts
- Hashnode: https://sr-palatasingh.hashnode.dev/series/aws-devops-blog
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumyaranjan-palatasingh/
Coming up next: Introduction to AWS Services.
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