How To Stay Within AWS Free Tier Limits and Avoid Surprises

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IN TODAY'S EDITION

🧠 Use Case

• How To Stay Within AWS Free Tier Limits and Avoid Surprises

🚀 Top News

• Experts Uncover New XorDDoS Controller, Infrastructure as Malware Expands to Docker, Linux, IoT

👀 Remote Jobs

• Livepeer is hiring a Lead Site Reliability Engineer

  Remote Location: Worldwide

• Clipboard Health is hiring a Technical Operations Manager (AWS preferred)

  Remote Location: Worldwide

📚️ Resources

• Free ArgoCD Up & Running eBook (Early Release)

• 90DaysOfDevOps - DevOps structured learning map

• The order of files in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/ matters (and may surprise you)

📢 Reddit Threads

• Istio or Cillium ?

• Is it just me, or is AWS a bit pricey for beginners?

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🧠 USE CASE

How To Stay Within AWS Free Tier Limits and Avoid Surprises

The most common and painful query I receive is about billing shocks from AWS Free Tier usage. It happens too often. Just like the case below:

If I were starting on AWS today, I would do this as a beginner using the 12 Month Free Tier:

1. Know What’s Actually Free

12 month Free Tier includes:

• 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro

• 5 GB S3 storage

• 750 hours of RDS db.t2.micro so on…

Check and track Free Tier usage

2. Set a Billing Alarm on Day 1

• Go to Billing → Budgets → Create Budget

• Set an alert at $1 or $5 to stay notified early

Step-by-step: Set up AWS Budgets

3. Monitor with Cost Explorer

• Use filters by service or region

• Spot growing usage before it crosses Free Tier limits

How to use AWS Cost Explorer

4. Tag All Resources

Use tags like FreeTierTest or CleanupLater, makes cleanup easier and usage visible

How to tag resources using the Tag Editor

5. Clean Up Actively

Even stopped resources can be billed:

• EC2 stopped = OK

• EBS volumes = Charged until deleted

• RDS = Charged for storage even if paused and so on.,

How to find and delete unused resources

6. Restrict What Can Be Launched

• Use IAM to allow only Free Tier services

• Block things like NAT Gateway and large EC2 types

Example IAM policies for EC2 access control

The AWS Free Tier gives you a great start. But only if you actively stay within limits.

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