Demo: DynamoDB Sign-up

Good to know

AWS is a pay-as-you-go service. We will only be charged for what we use. Also, most of our trial and error will fall under the free-tier category of use.

Sign-up process

Let’s sign up for AWS in order to use DynamoDB. If you already have an account on AWS, please skip this section. Here are the steps for signing up:

1. Go to the website aws.amazon.com.
2. Click on the “Create an AWS Account” button located in the top-right corner(if you have already created an account, this button will say: “Sign In to the Console”).
3. Fill in the required details, namely your email address, a strong password, and an account name. Then, click on the option to continue.
4. Choose the account type as “Personal”.
5. Fill out your contact details. AWS might call you to confirm your given phone number. Click on the “Create Account and Continue” option.
6. After this, add your card details. AWS will charge you $1 to confirm your card details. This amount will be refunded back to your bank account within a few days.
7. Now, if everything went well, you should see the “AWS Management Console”.
8. Choose DynamoDB services from under the Database section. You can also search “DynamoDB” in the Console’s search Bar.
9. You are, now, good to work with this service.

Setting budget alarm

As the first step, we should set up a budget alarm. The alarm will inform us if we’re about to cross our monthly usage threshold. This is an optional step. However, it is highly recommended to save money.

To set up the budget alarm, we’ll need to do:

1. Log on to the “AWS Management Console”. This is the same page we reached after signing up. This is the homepage of our AWS account, which opens up logging in.
2. Click on our account name located at the top-right corner.
3. A drop-down menu will appear, from which we will click on the “My Billing Dashboard” option. This will open up our billing dashboard.
4. Click on the “Budgets” option listed in the “Cost Management” section on the left, which will open up our budget dashboard.
5. Click on the “Create Budget” option, which will create a budget for us to get alerts.
6. Choose a name for our budget, set the period as monthly, and keep it as a recurring budget.
7. In the “Specify Your Budget” section, we will choose the “Fixed Budget” option and fill “$10” in the “Budget Amount” section. The rest of the sections will be left as they are.
8. Click on the “Configure Thresholds” option, located at the bottom, and go to the next page.
9. On the next page, we will choose the threshold options. It is recommended for us to choose a threshold based on actual cost and keep the alert threshold at 80% of the budgeted amount.
10. Provide our email address in the “Email Recipient” text box of the “Set Up your Notifications” section. The alerts will be sent on this email ID.
11. Finally, Click on the “Confirm Budget” option and, on the next page, click on the “Create” button to confirm the budget.

Now, we are all set to go through the course.