Account Setup & Billing

[00:00:00]
>> So, I got to the parts where I put in all my personal information and my credit card and all those fun things. And gone through the kind of tail end of the signup process, you can choose your support level. I think for the most part we're in this as a team, so we can go with the basic support.

[00:00:17]
If you wanna spend over $15,000 a month you can also get conch hair style service, that's a choice. But I think that generally speaking, basic support has never failed me. Awesome, and here is my kind of congratulations piece as well. And one of the first things you'll notice is we have two kinds of users.

[00:00:42]
We have a root user, and then IM user, right? Right now we only have a root account, and you can even look at it. Account owner, the performance test and unrestricted access, right? That is the only kind of account that we have right now. But we should probably seek to not have that kind of account, right?

[00:01:04]
It's very much like if you use a Unix based operating system, one does not go around as the root user and do whatever they want. One usually makes at least a user to has to sudo to use the really destructive commands. Or if they are incredibly responsible, then they will make one that has no access and switch into even an administrator user when they have to do stuff.

[00:01:28]
So, we're going to at least take that first step and go from our root user and make it administrator user. When we start creating additional roles like for our CICD process, maybe we'll make a third user, when I say maybe I mean definitely. Will make a third user that has only access to put files in a specific bucket, right?

[00:01:50]
Or just create an invalidation on CloudFront. So on and so forth, right? Generally speaking, we wanna use the principle of least privilege or the principle of least access to create additional users for different things. If this project you're studying right now, turns into being a large company, you might also for various different humans at your company, be cool.

[00:02:13]
You can deploy the app you work on to production, you can't do this other app, so on and so forth, right? But step one is we'd like to stop being a root user and start being some other kind of user. So, let's get that set up. I like the number of things trying to help me fill in my password.

[00:02:39]
That's a fun one. Awesome. So, this is kind of the beginnings of everything that we need. You might, if you've logged in at all even from another account, you might see recently visited services here cuz mostly they are stored in local storage. So, if you have used this browser in another account, don't be weirded out because they are in your browser not because somebody has logged into this account in the few seconds when you made it and right now.

[00:03:20]
So, with that, the easiest way to get around, you could for instance, go to services. And you can see that there are many categories, and you could try to navigate through all of them hit on all services if you want to stress yourself out. There are like hundreds of AWS services.

[00:03:36]
Or you use this fun bar up here and you can go ahead and type in, let's say for our case, billing. Because the question we got in the very beginning, of how much is this going to cost me? Ideally not that much. I did tell one fib, it will recurringly cost you 50 cent if you choose to register a domain that costs money, right, but there's no requirement that you do so.

[00:04:03]
You might choose not to, you might already have a domain, for those of us who buy domains and they have an idea and just have tons of domain sitting around that is also In option as well. But what we want to do is should anything happen where we might go over a certain threshold, we would at least like to get notified about it before it happens, right?

[00:04:28]
So, one of the first things we're gonna do for ourselves is set up some alerting around our billing. So, that we'll go into, first we're going to billing preferences here. And we definitely want to receive free to usage alerts, right? So, if anything we're using we've blown past the free tier, then we'd like to get an email about that as well.

[00:04:56]
And so, you can also get all sorts of other ways to get billing alerts and stuff along those lines. Save that as well. And with that, we're gonna go into budgets. And we'll go ahead and we'll create a budget. You don't have a lot of choices in the very beginning.

[00:05:27]
So, this is basically, and to be clear, there's a bunch of different kinds of budgets, right? The one that we are most concerned about is the only one we have access to. So, the one we're most concerned about at this stage of our very new seed company is cost, right?

[00:05:44]
So, we want to go ahead and make sure that we have a cost budget, so we'll pick that and we will select next Awesome, so you can say during what period you wanna be known about. Do you wanna be notified whether it's a daily budget or monthly budget or quarterly budget?

[00:06:05]
I'm gonna say monthly is fine for me, and started immediately and my expected month, it doesn't know my last month cost because this account is as you all saw. So that I'm at the same place as you a minutes old account, so we'll go ahead, I'm gonna say $10.

[00:06:19]
One of the things that just to keep in mind, if you choose to buy a domain, it's probably about 12 bucks. So, you will get an alert immediately upon that moment, but that will also verify to you that it works. So, you can choose 20, you can choose 10, I'm gonna choose 10 for our purposes.

[00:06:39]
You can also figure out where you wanna scope that budget, again, these are really great if you already have something in production and you generally know the shape of it. Right now, we wanna say if it passes 10, 20, what have you, I just want to know, right?

[00:06:59]
And it is kinda on you to be on top of that, right? Cuz you think about, you might personally be like listen, after 20 bucks I'm out, right? But what is Amazon's choice at that point, shut down your site. There are other people who are like, cool I had a spike in traffic cuz our product went viral.

[00:07:20]
Accidentally they had a budget. So, it's on you to kind of step in there upon receiving that notification. So, whatever the threshold is, you need to figure that out for yourself. I'm gonna call it budget. Awesome, so I've got that budget threshold created. You can also I believe, you can set it for different thresholds and stuff along those lines.

[00:07:44]
You'd be like, cool when you've gotten 75-to 80% of that budget. So, it's not like, you've blown past it, too bad, you can get different alerts along the way, as well. All right, so now at least, if for some reason someone gets into a root account and gets untethered access and everything, well at least get a notification before it gets bad.

[00:08:08]
But it'd be more helpful kinda making sure that doesn't happen, right? And there are a bunch of ways that we can do this.