AWS Skillbuilders Community Workshop Series: Creating an AWS Free Tier Account Workshop - Josh Blair

Many of us have run countless structured labs in AWS Skill Builder, AWS re/Start, and AWS Educate, but have never set up and managed an AWS account of our own. Those sandboxes do the cleanup for you. A real account is a different skill: you own the billing, the security, and the teardown. That is exactly what this session is about. @Josh Blair is leading a hands-on walkthrough: Creating an AWS Free Tier Account, covering account setup, credit management, and your first deployment. Great for beginners, and a solid refresher for everyone, especially with the Free Tier changes in 2025. What Josh will cover: • What's new in the AWS Free Plan: the old 12-month Free Tier is gone for new accounts, and here's what replaced it (Free Plan vs. Paid Plan, up to $200 in credits, the 6-month window) • A live walkthrough of creating your account step by step, including credit card verification, the "not eligible" notice some users hit, and the first things to do right after signup (MFA on root, set your region) • Cost and credit management from day one: AWS Budgets, monitoring the Billing Dashboard, and the security reasons MFA matters • What you can actually build on the Free Plan, including which services are Always Free and which require switching to paid • A live demo: hosting a static website on S3, deploying it with a CloudFormation template, and tearing it down cleanly to preserve credits • Q&A, common gotchas, and where to go deeper What you'll walk away with: your own properly configured AWS account, good cost and security habits from the start, and a real deployment under your belt.