“I have no special talent. I am passionately curious — Albert Einstein”
Well, I will not compare myself to Albert Einstein but I am a curious guy when it comes to learning things. I am a computer enthusiast and a decent coder who wanted to learn more than coding. So I looked for other things to pursue as a career where I came to know about Networking and CCNA and blah! blah! blah! When I started to learn Networking Concepts, something always told me Networking and Systems Operations is not your thing. I did not listen to it and pursued the Networking for nearly 6 months. I got a pretty good knowledge of DNS, VPC, and more… When I was learning Networking, I came across the word “Cloud” and had no idea about it. So I decided to look over it. That is when it Happened…..!
So, I started an AWS Account.
I am a first-year student who had good knowledge of coding and limited knowledge of Networking. I entered the AWS Management Console. I didn’t read the terms of Free Tier. When I saw the Free Tier Word, I thought it was like Amazon Prime and thought AWS is free for 1 year. So I gave my father’s debit card and casually logged in. I thought all the resources in the AWS were free. So I fired up an instance and I had some previous knowledge of Linux. I was cautious enough to fire up a free tier Linux but I was not clever enough to turn off those instances. Once the EC2 instances were fired up, I logged into it and played some basic commands.
Then it Happened….!
I did not terminate those instances and caught up with my college semester. I completely forgot about the instances, that was running 24x7 and my free tier got over and the bill was running up.
The miserable thing is I had changed my E-mail address and so I did not saw those alerts and Emails.
The price of the instance running went above 10K every month. In AWS, the amount above 10K should be manually authorized which saved me big time. Accidentally, I went to my email and saw those alerts and went crazy for 10mins. Then I calmed myself and raised a ticket with AWS Customer Support
I freaked out in the chat and I was literally crying to him in the chat. He called me and calmed me. So I had three months of the bill which was around 35K. He said he could give me a discount of around two months and told me to pay the last month’s amount. I explained my situation again and insisted that I am a student. he contacted his manager and got back to me with the news
"We are giving you full discount but this is last time, Please be careful !” — CSR
I jumped with joy and deleted the AWS account immediately. But the incident had a great impact on me. Whenever I do a wrong thing, it is my nature to do the thing again right. So I looked over the Cloud Computing and loved it.
Now I hold Cloud Practitioner level knowledge and waiting for the right opportunity to pursue the Exam. I have decided to become an Cloud Solutions Architect. Its been a year but till now I didn’t start an another account in AWS. I took AWS Fundamentals Specialization Course in Coursera, I watched the entire course and took notes but still it is too scary for me to start another AWS account. I am going to start an account after this post and I decided to write all my pursuing in Cloud Here...