The new way to start on AWS

With the advent of AI and all these fancy coding assistants, we see that more and more people are starting to build stuff. Huzzah! From tiny bespoke applications, to something the want to share with the wider world. However localhost:3000 is not always reachable outside of ... well, localhost. So why not just deploy to AWS? 🤔

Listen, I get it. Setting up a brand new AWS account, configuring users, permissions, budgets can be daunting. And a lot of new AWS users do not really want to deal with all that. Especially when you just want to deploy. Well ...

We've just released something very neat. 🥳 A brand new way to not only create an AWS account but also to work with one! Something that should address all those issues I just mentioned in the previous paragraph! Let's just look at this.

First off, you get to sign-up for a new account not only with your email but also with a choice of social account (at the time of writing its Google, Github, Apple and Amazon). And most new customers won't even need a credit card for sign up, and will receive $100 in AWS credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. That's it! You are ready to build!

However, if you (like me) have had an AWS account associated to some of your details, you may not be able to get the Free Tier. This will just require you to enter your payment information but you still get all the same benefits of this new experience.

Okay the basic structure of this new experience revolves around projects. A project is basically an AWS account that contains all the resources you build, your configuration, and members of your team. A lot of this is abstracted away from you so you do not have to worry about the intricacies (until you are ready to do so).

Resources in one project are not readily visible to resources in another project, the same goes for permissions. When you invite team members to one projects they do not have access to another one (unless you invite them there too).

This is an excellent way to easily separate concerns and permissions without having to worry about setting up complex AWS Organizations and the like... However if you look closely you will see that this creates an AWS Organization, with each project being a sub-account under a management account. All that with an Identity center set-up just for you!

I've been working at AWS for almost 11 years now, and one of the most common asks I've heard from new AWS customers is: "How can I set-up AWS so it stops when I spend more than $25". Now, in my head that was not the good way to go. You should not stop something that is doing work for you just because you went over a certain amount. Well, I was wrong. Developers do need that, especially in the world where they are exploring and trying stuff out.

And now, that feature is part of this new AWS Account experience! When you upgrade to a paid account you are now able to set a spend limit that will prevent your account from going over a certain amount. However it is not just a simple On/Off switch that will stop your AWS account from working it's a bit more elaborate.

At a certain point in your spend, you will start receiving notifications. Then as we expect you to reach your limit within 7 days, the creation of new resources will be blocked. Closer to 5 days to (the estimated) limit hit, your idle resources will be paused. And finally once you reach your spend limit your entire project is paused. The data will be preserved but you will have to manually restart your resources once you have reactivated the project.

This new set of features will let you sleep a bit better at night and not have to worry about some sort of runaway cost.

Oh, and before you upgrade to a paid account, all of your Free Tier credits are spread across any amount of projects you have!

You may be asking yourself (or me): "But I don't want this. How do I get back to the old / full AWS account experience?".

We got you covered! There is no an "Activate Advanced Features" button available on your project management page. This will basically give you access to all of the AWS account features and will put you back in the AWS Account experience you've seen before with all the features you'd ever need! But be careful, this is a one way decision, and you will not be able to revert back. So make this decision wisely and see how much of the advanced features do you really need.

Now, go build! ❤️