A ‘quick’ way to get our hands to a public cloud

By: Ardimas Purwita, Ph.D

With the emerging public cloud services, today’s developers/engineers/hobbyists/enthusiasts can get their hands into enterprise-scale computing resources quite easily.
This is not the case prior to the era of public cloud.
Those resources seem to be tangible or palpable for certain people only, e.g., sysadmins working in a big company.
Another benefit of a public cloud service is that we can take advantage of public cloud’s on-demand or pay-as-you-go concept.
That is, the computing resources can be provisioned at the price of less than a dollar per hour (around tens of cents per hour).
However, as a first-timer, sometimes we want something for free; this includes access to the computing resources for the sake of trying.
For a certain cloud provider, we are still required to pay for the registration process.
For example, Amazon Web Service (AWS) demands a dollar registration fee for our account confirmation.
(Other public cloud providers support free access from the registration process to provisioning resources with limited access time or credit. Let’s focus on AWS in this article for an obvious reason.)

One way to try AWS is by using Qwikslabs.
Qwikslabs is a hands-on lab environment that provides a sandbox to users so that they can access AWS console with certain limitations.
(So far I only find labs that provide access to the console. Other than a console, users can provision AWS resources by using a CLI or SDK.)
However, not all labs are free.
In order to try paid labs, users must buy credits from Qwikslabs.
Still, we are interested in free ones.
The following are the list of free labs.

• Introduction to Amazon Redshift
• Introduction to AWS Lambda
• Introduction to AWS Device Farm
• Introduction to Amazon API Gateway
• Introduction to Amazon CloudFront
• S3: Multi-region Storage Backup with Cross-Region Replication
• Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Introduction to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Introduction to Amazon DynamoDB

P.S.
By the end of a lab, you might feel that architecting in a cloud is tedious and error-prone as it involves many clickings. Don’t worry because AWS has automation services such as the ‘infrastructure as a code’ CloudFormation, OpsWork (for Chef and Puppet), or ECS and EKS (for containerization and orchestration by using K8s).

In the end, this list might not satisfy your needs in exploring AWS services.
Nevertheless, you at least can get what it means by:

• the on-demand characteristic of cloud,
• provisioning in a matter of minutes,
• serverless,
• authentication and authorization in the cloud, or <\li>
• managed services.

Enjoy the labs!!