Editing Cloud Homelabs (section)

=== Amazon AWS ===
Amazon provide one of the most generous "free tier" options of all vendors. 12 months of free (limited) access to a load of their services, including the ability to run one Linux VM, one Windows VM and one RDS (database) instance 24/7/365! Actually this breaks down for the EC2 instances as 750 hours per month, which you can use however you like. For example you could run 10 instances for 3 days!
[[File:security-keys-meme.jpg|250px|border|right]]This is a truly excellent service from the world's biggest biggest cloud vendor, and can potentially leave you with a bill of pennies to a couple of dollars at the end of the month, even with pretty heavy use! Just make sure you turn off your instances at the end of each session and look after your keys, and you wont pay anything for them except their storage (which is a pittance anyway)!
A couple of key links for setting up your AWS account are below:
* [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/free-tier-alarms.html Creating a Billing Alarm]
* [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/best-practices.html IAM Best Practices]
* [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/root-vs-iam.html Root Account Credentials vs. IAM User Credentials]
For more information and advice on using Amazon AWS as your homelab, see our dedicated page on [[Amazon AWS]] homelabs.