Introduction

This is for the "I want to try AWS but I'm scared of the bill" and "I made an account once and never did anything with it" crowd. By the end of the next 30 minutes you'll have something running, and you'll have actually touched the parts of AWS that matter.

The finished pipeline:

What you touch by building it:

S3 : the cloud object store

Lambda : a serverless runtime where you just put code and it runs

DynamoDB : managed NoSQL database

IAM : permission management for everything (the hidden main character of this article)

CloudWatch : logs, metrics, alarms

AWS Budgets : monthly cost alerts

AWS CLI : the command-line interface for talking to AWS from your machine

And the core stays inside the Always Free tier . The S3 usage in this hands-on is tiny (a few dozen bytes, a handful of requests), so even if S3 isn't strictly "Always Free" for your account type, the credit consumption is effectively $0.…