Hello everyone, welcome to module one AWS boot camp kickoff. This is the first and foundational module in our every AWS boot camp series. Whether you are following the AWS solution architect associate, AWS AI practitioner or cloud practitioner track, this module is common to all because every AWS journey begins with setting up your AWS account the right way. In this video, you will learn how to create your free AWS account and configure budget alerts to help you manage cost and avoid unexpected charges. On behalf of the cloud expert solution team, I would like to thank you for joining us and exploring this boot camp. If you have already subscribed to our channel, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. It truly means a lot to our team. If you haven't subscribed yet, we kindly invite you to do so and gain access to premium cloud courses and certification boot camps, all for free. Before we begin, a quick but important point. You do not need hands-on practice to pass the AWS certification exam. It's entirely possible to clear it through study, whiteboarding, and understanding the concepts. However, hands-on experience makes learning real. It helps you internalize how AWS services work and makes the concept stick to your brain. Here is a quick dos and don'ts. Please perform the hands-on with us because it's a challenging certification. So, this course will be long but interesting. And please clean up the resources after each module. And please don't keep your resources running. Also, please don't skip this module. Let's get started. We'll start with our first section where you'll sign up for a free AWS account. And this free AWS account will help you to do all those practicals. If you want to follow along with us, now let me walk you through sign up for your free AWS account. To create your free account, please open any browser. You can use Google or Mosilla Firefox and type AWS management console. The first result in the search list AWS management console and we'll click AWS management console. Now you have an option to sign in and create account. We'll follow the create account link. To begin the process, enter your email address and an unique account name. Let me enter my email ID and account name and then I'll click verify email address. If you already have an AWS account from your organization, you can create a new one. And I will recommend you to use a separate email to track all your AWS learning expenses. Once you enter your email ID, the next step would be security verification. AWS wants to understand that you are not a robot. So you need to enter the capture code in the verification answer section. Let's enter the capture code and click submit. AWS will verify the email ID belongs to you. That is why they will send an email with a verification code to your email. So please access your email and get the verification code and enter in this section and then click verify. I'll also do the same. I'll enter the verification code and then I'll click verify. Next, I need to set a password for this account. Please remember this will be your root user account and this account will have access to everything. So please make sure you are choosing a strong password which is not easy to guess, not easy to crack. I'll choose my password and then I'll click on continue. Here is the rule for the password and let's continue. The next step is you need to provide your contact details. From the account type, please select personal. Unless and until you have a business use case or if you are not creating for your organization, then you should select personal. Please enter your personal details. I'm going to populate my personal details in terms of name, mobile number, address. Then I'll tick on the check box that I have read and agree the terms of the AWS customer agreement. And then I'll click agree and continue. The next step is you need to add your credit or debit card number. Please remember that AWS may place a temporary hold of $1 or less. But don't worry, it will be released. AWS will use this credit or debit card for billing purposes and AWS is not going to charge you unless and until you are crossing the free tier or if your account is one year old when the AWS free tier will be totally exhausted. Please enter your valid credit card details or else you won't be able to proceed further. And you can see we are on the step three of five. After entering the credit card details, there will be two more steps. So I will enter my credit card detail and then I'll click verify and continue. The next step is you need to verify your identity via phone or SMS. You can choose either text message or voice call. And based of your country of residence, you need to select the country code followed by the mobile number and then you will click send SMS. You might get one more time the capture validation. Let's enter the capture code. AWS has sent a text message with that OTP. Now you should also have received some OTP in your mobile. I'll enter the OTP and then I'll continue. Now this is the last step where you need to select a support plan. Please select the basic support which is free. Please do not select developer support or business support and then complete sign up. And that's it. Your AWS account is now live. Now it's time to log to the AWS account. To login you can click on the go to AWS management console. And here you go. I have logged into AWS management console. Let me give you a quick tour of the AWS management console because we are going to use AWS management console throughout our boot camp series. For me, the default region is set to Ohio, US 2. Let me change to US East1, Northern Virginia. And here I have all available regions. Based on your geographic location, you might see a different region. For this boot camp, we are going to choose US1 Northern Virginia. You can use US1 Northern Virginia or your default region to continue for all the demos. The top section is for recently visited services. If you access any AWS service, you will see that in this recently visited service. Since we have created this account phrase and we haven't accessed any service, that is why this section is blank. Then cost and uses. You will see cost and uses report after 24 or 48 hours. Sometimes it might take 48 hours. And it will give you your current cost and the forecasted cost for the entire month. Then from here you can go to AWS training and certifications. What is new? This is AWS health dashboard. It will show what are the issues. If there is any schedule changes or any notification, you will be able to monitor the AWS health section from here. Now to select any service, let's say you want to select virtual machine or EC2. You will go to service search option and from there you will type EC2 and here you go. All the services will be available. You will be redirected to EC2 dashboard. This is the EC2 dashboard. We are not going to perform anything on EC2. We'll have dedicated session for that. And if you want to go back to your landing screen, then click this AWS icon. And here you go. You can see EC2 in the recently visited section because you have accessed EC2. This was a quick overview of the AWS management console. Let's go to our section two where we are going to set up the budget and the billing alerts. Before you set up the budget and the billing alerts, if you are asking yourself that why should you set up the budget or billing alerts since you have the account ready. Now let's talk about the money and any charges will be a real money even though AWS has a generic free tier but the services are metered and you can accidentally incur cost. For example, if you are keeping your EC2 instance running for long time or maybe you have forgotten to turn off your services or if you are using a service which is outside the free tier limit then you are going to get build. If you want to follow along with us, please keep aside a budget of $1 to $3. We are going to use the free tier services and we will try to be inside the free tier. However, if you are sensitive for cost, then you don't have to repeat any practical or any lab session, still you will be good and you will be able to pass the certification because AWS certification does not require you to log to management console or do any labs during the certification. By setting this budget, I am trying to protect you in case any resources are running in your account. You will get notification before any unexpected charges appear in your next month bill. That is why it's crucial to set a budget and alert system on day one. Setting a budget is completely free and AWS lets you set alerts based on your monthly spend. Now, we'll navigate to AWS management console and we are going to set up the budget and the billing alerts. back to my AWS management console and I'll go to billing dashboard. From service search option, I'm going to type billing and I'll choose billing and cost management. If you are accessing for the first time, you will not have any data available. That is why you can see month-to- date cost data is not available. This is absolutely normal because we do not have any data available. It's a freshly created account. I'm going to cross this alert and from the left hand side I'll come to budget and planning and from there I'm going to select budgets. This is the AWS budget dashboard. From here you can create a budget. Let's create a new budget. To configure you have two options. Either you can use a template or you can use a customized option. If you are going to use template then you have very less option to perform because behind the scene AWS is going to take care. However, if we choose customize what we are going to do then you will be able to see all the options and you can customize based on your requirement. We are going to create a customized budget but let me show you the available options if you choose a template. There are four different available templates. Either you can go with zero spend budget. If you do not want to spend any money and if you are getting charged 1 cent then also AWS will send you alert. If you want to set aside some monthly budget then you can choose this. If you want to go for daily savings plan coverage or reserve instance for savings plan and reserve instance we are going to cover in greater depth. So you don't have to concentrate here but here are the different option. You have to provide the budget name, your budget amount. For this course, you are good with $3, the email recipient and then create budget. That's all. However, we are going to choose the customize option. For customize budget also, you have four options. You can create cost budget, usage budget, savings plan, and reservation budget. We are going to choose cost budget. And then we are going to click next. Next, we have to provide a budget name. Maybe I'll use cloud expert solutions or CES monthly budget. The budget period you can configure monthly, daily, quarterly, annually. I'll select monthly and please select recurring budget. The start month would be from June 2025 since I am recording in June 2025. The budgeting method is fixed. If you want a plan budget, auto adjusting budget, then you can consider. But for this demo, let's select fixed. Enter your budgeted amount. I'm going to place $5 here. You can choose whatever the amount you want. You can choose $1, $3, $5. For the budget scope, I am going to choose all the AWS services. You can also create budget for specific services. If you want to create budget for compute instances or databases, you can do so. From the advanced option, I'm going to choose the average cost by unblended cost. You have option for amotized, blended, not blended. Just select unblended cost. Tagging is optional. I'm not going to add any new tag. I'm going to click next. In this step, we'll configure an alert threshold. The threshold defines the trigger point at which AWS will send a budget notification. By default, the alert threshold is set to 80% of the budgeted amount, but you can choose any percentage you prefer. For earlier notification, you might want to set it to 50% or even lower, but I will use the default 80%. Let me explain with an example. If your budgeted amount is $5 and the threshold is set to 80%, AWS will send you an alert when your cost reaches $4. A 50% threshold would mean an alert at $2.50. You can also configure the alert to be triggered based on either actual cost or forecasted cost. I recommend selecting forecasted cost because if you choose actual cost, you will receive the alert only after the charge has been applied to your account. But if you choose forecasted cost, AWS predicts your charges and can notify you before the cost is incurred. This is useful if you forgot to shut down your EC2 instances or keeping your database running. Based on this example, once my forecasted charge hits $4, AWS will send a budget alert. Next, under notification preference, enter the email address where you want to receive the alert. You can add more than one email address if needed. Optionally, you can also configure Amazon SNS or AWS chatbot notifications, but for this demo, we are going to skip. We don't need it. Once everything is configured, please click next to proceed. Then in the attach action section, it is not mandatory. Attach action is optional. That is why I'm going to skip this. I'm going to go with the next. And the next is the review screen where you can review all the options and then create budget. Here you go. Your budget has been created successfully. So you have configured the budget and the budgeted amount is $5. Here you can see current versus budgeted as you are going to use the AWS services and if you are using anything which is not covered by AWS free tier then you will see the charges and now you will receive email if your spend approaches the threshold limit. Before we complete let's recap in this video we have created a free AWS account. We have learned why hands is helpful even though it's not required and we have set up the billing protection to avoid any unexpected charges. With this setup, your learning is safe, controlled and free. In the next modules, we'll explore AWS management console and start getting familiar with core AWS services. That wraps up this module. If you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more AWS exam preparation courses and cloud certification boot camps. Got questions or feedback? Drop them in the comment. We love to hear from you. Thanks for learning with us at Cloud Expert Solutions. You are now one step closer to crossing your exam. See you in the next module.