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Ask HN: As a student, what should I do with my AWS Credits?

17 points by Stevo11 ↗ HN
I've recently been given a few hundred dollars worth of AWS credits from the Github student pack and as a hackathon prize. What kind of things would you recommend I spend them on as an undergraduate student in Software Engineering?

4 comments

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Guest98123
I'd focus on better understanding an AWS workflow, and use the credits to cover those small fees that are going to add up during your experimentation and testing.

For example...

Setup a web server, and database server in a VPC.

Configure your security groups and network access.

Buy a domain, and configure Route53 to point it to your servers.

Launch a simple website.

Try scaling your storage drives up or down.

Move your CSS and JS files to S3.

Setup CloudFront as a CDN for your S3 files.

Setup ELB (Elastic Load Balancing).

Take a snapshot and AMI (Amazon Machine Image) of your web server, and configure an autoscaling group so your web servers scale on demand.

Design a backup solution for your database, such as automatically encrypting and dumping it to S3 IA (Infrequent Access) every night, and having outdated backups automatically delete after N days.

Figure out how you're going to test new releases, and push updates without downtime.

Use Certificate Manager to generate a certificate and configure your load balancer and server for HTTPS.

Configure notifications with the SNS (Simple Notification Service) so you're alerted of server failures.

Use CloudWatch to monitor your resources and better understand Amazon billing management.

framebit
These are excellent suggestions! In so many words, use AWS to learn the kind of infrastructure and practical ops stuff that you won't learn in your coursework.

Also when you get comfortable with administrating AWS stuff from the console, consider using Terraform or another infrastructure automation tool to run your environment.

sevilo
Wow, this is such great suggestion with well defined steps. I am not a student but have been wanting to know more about infrastructures and AWS since I have mostly been doing application level work.

Thank you for this suggestion!

tedmiston
A great use case is to run your side projects, a blog, etc with the free credit.