AWS labs on qwikLabs platform

Last month @sebsto (March 2016) announced that all the labs on qwikLabs were FREE till the end of the month (March 2016). This was a great opportunity to learn (by doing) Amazon Web Services (AWS).

I managed to complete 2 Quests and have to say that my experience was pretty great. By following the labs I ended up spending more than 10 hours using the AWS platform for free. In the process I launched multiple EC2 instances, databases and deployed an application to a Docker container.

Completed Quests over the free period

When I started using AWS, I was not so sure what services were eligible for the free tier and ended up getting a bill at the end of the month. Since then I have been careful on what I use and switched off virtual machines as soon as the work is complete.

Now the offer period is finished, I can only wish the offer was extended (but it was not). But on the positive side, there are dozens of free introductory labs on offer. I think once you get started on a service you should be able to follow the documentation and learn about it a bit more. Therefore the free labs should be enough for me to start looking at new services without any risk of getting a bill at the end of the month.

My recommendation is to do as many labs as possible and learn about the platform. As many say, there is no substitute for the real hands-on experience, and these labs will start you on your journey.