A new AWS account starts on a Free plan. You get credits to spend on AWS services, and the plan lasts up to 6 months or until the credits run out. That is enough to practise the core services a cloud beginner needs: IAM for access, EC2 for servers, S3 for storage, RDS for databases, a VPC for networking and CloudWatch for monitoring. The trick is to practise with a plan and clean up after yourself.
How the AWS Free Tier works now
In 2025 AWS changed the Free Tier for new accounts. The older model gave you a year of limited free use on many services. The new model gives you a choice of two plans when you sign up.
| Free plan | Paid plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Credits for new customers | Yes | Yes |
| Services | A smaller set of services | All AWS services |
| Charges | None, unless you upgrade or turn on a paid-only service | You pay for use beyond your credits |
| How long | Up to 6 months, or until the credits run out | No end date |
A few rules matter for a learner:
- Credits: you get some credits when you sign up, and more for finishing a few starter tasks in the AWS console. The current amounts are on the official aws.amazon.com/free page.
- End of the plan: after 6 months, or when the credits are gone, AWS suspends the account. Your data is kept for 90 days. If you upgrade to the Paid plan in that time, you get it back. If you do not, AWS deletes the account and everything in it.
- Always free: AWS says more than 30 services stay free within monthly limits on both plans.
- One way only: you can upgrade from the Free plan to the Paid plan, but you cannot go back.
- New customers only: if you have had an AWS account before, the Free plan and its credits are not for you.
AWS changes these details from time to time. Check the official page and its FAQ before you sign up.
What to practise, in order
Practise in this order. Each step builds on the one before it.
- Secure the account. Turn on MFA (a second login step) for the root user. Create an IAM user for daily work, and never make access keys for the root account.
- IAM roles and policies. Create a group with limited rights. Give a server a role instead of storing a key on it. This is least privilege: only the access that is needed.
- Launch an EC2 server. Pick a small instance, open only the ports you need in its security group, log in over SSH and install a web server.
- Store files in S3. Make a bucket, turn on versioning and keep public access blocked.
- Build a VPC. Make a public subnet for the web server and a private subnet for the database.
- Run a database on RDS. Put a small Postgres database in the private subnet and connect to it from your server.
- Watch it with CloudWatch. Read the server metrics and set an alarm.
- Do it again from the terminal. Repeat a few steps with the AWS CLI, so you are not tied to clicking.
When you finish each session, delete what you made. Rebuilding from your notes is good practice in itself.
Avoid a surprise bill
On the Free plan, AWS says it will not charge you unless you upgrade. But credits still run out, and a forgotten resource can burn through them and get your account suspended. On a Paid plan, the same mistake costs real money. These habits protect you on both:
- Watch your balance. The Console Home page shows your remaining credits and days left on the Free plan. AWS also emails you as they run low.
- Set budgets and billing alerts. AWS Budgets can email you when spending passes an amount you choose. In our course you set alarms at USD 1, 5 and 20 before building anything.
- Stop is not delete. A stopped EC2 server still keeps its disk, and disks and snapshots are charged. Terminate what you no longer need.
- Skip the hourly traps. Some services charge for every hour they exist, even when idle. A NAT gateway and a managed Kubernetes cluster (EKS) are common examples.
- Tag everything. Put a tag like project=practice on every resource, so you can find leftovers later.
- Keep a teardown checklist. Go through servers, databases, load balancers, snapshots and buckets in every region you used.
- Never put keys on GitHub. Leaked AWS keys get found and abused quickly. Use roles, and keep secrets out of your code.
Practise with a mentor
Practising alone works if you are careful. A mentor helps when something breaks and you cannot tell why. Our AWS training runs inside the Cloud Computing & DevOps course. You do all the steps above on your own Free plan account, with a teardown checklist and budget alarms from day one.
