What are some things I can try and will benefit me while I have this 1 yr free trial?
I can always buy my VPS later and move these self-hosted service there, if need be in the future. [AWS is very costly, hee hee]
Share some cool ideas!
Definitely set a CloudWatch alert to notify you if the cost goes above a certain limit. And make sure you check that email regularly. It takes a small misconfiguration to rack up a hefty bill. Best to catch it early.
Other suggestion is to stay away from the console or command line. Learn how to use CloudFormation or, much better, the CDK. You can set up a full serverless application stack, run it for a while, then delete the whole thing so it won’t accidentally incur extra charges. It’s also a good practice so you can include the stack setup code with the rest of your code.
Free tier is super limited and super easy to accidentally break out of. I had a single file in S3, but because my logging settings were wrong, I broke the free tier with junk logs.
The t2 micro ec2 instances are fine, but you need to be very careful about their storage and network egress.
Best use I’ve had for AWS that has managed to stay within the free limits has been Lambda. Managed to convert a couple self hosted discord bots to a few Lambda functions, works great. Plugging it into CloudFormation and tying up CI/CD with CodePipeline and the like were overkill but good learning exp.
I don’t think there’s any ECS free tier, but you can fit a private container repository in the free S3 limits as well.