It’s time for your first

hands-on exercise with AWS.

Before you can begin building on AWS,

you’ll have to have an AWS account.

So for your first exercise,

we ask that you create an account with AWS,

verify the account

and then you’ll set up some billing alerts.

When you create an AWS account,

you can then begin using the services

and a lot of different AWS services offer a free tier.

The free tier varies from service to service

and all of the services that we chose for this course

do have a free tier where you can use the resources for free

with a limited capacity for a limited amount of time.

If you have an existing AWS account

that you are trying to use,

there’s a chance that you won’t qualify for the free tier

and would incur costs for the exercises

that you complete in this course.

So for this first exercise,

it’s going to be pretty straightforward

and we are building up to the more complex tasks involved

with hosting our employee directory application.

You’ll create and confirm your new AWS account,

log in to that account and then you’ll explore

how to do some basic management tasks

like where to find your account information,

how to change regions using the management console

and setting up those billing alerts.

You will set up a billing alert

just in case you create a resource

and then you forget to turn it off or delete it.

You’ll at least be notified

when you have hit a certain threshold

in the account for cost.

So that’s it for now.

And make sure you utilize the discussion forums

to ask questions if you get stuck

or want more information on a specific topic.