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. No surprise charges 6 months from now either.…