Basic AWS housekeeping
There are a few things I have not done that would prevent me from seeing a surprise bill from AWS at the end of the month as well as making my AWS accounts more secure. Let's quickly do those things.
Securing my accounts
Don't do everything from the root user. This is something that will be repeated multiple times during the AWS Cloud Practitioner learning path. They mean it. So, I made an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user almost as soon as I started the cloud resume challenge.
Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA)- I only use passwords to secure both of my accounts at the moment. That's not good. Here's how I went about doing it. I completely forgot about the existence of AWS IAM. I did remember that Trusted Advisor does those checks and might point me in the right direction. It kind of did, but there was no way I was reading all that.
At this point I remembered IAM and hoped that it would give me a more painless and streamlined process.
It does. A button. Thank goodness. I pressed the button, followed the instructions, configured it how I liked, repeated for the root user and that was that.
Cost alerts
Now to configure some cost alerts because I am but a humble recent college graduate. I can't afford big spending on random projects in the cloud. At least not yet. This is what I went with:
With this, my accounts are more secure and if AWS tries to rob me blind, at least I'll see it coming. If you're reading this and are a beginner to AWS, I highly recommend you do the same for the same reasons.
The advice is not mine, I got them from a helpful guy on YouTube.