| > unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it The default is to have current and estimated monthly cost displayed on your root console as soon as you login. You will also get email alerts when you hit 50% and then 80% of your "free tier quota" in a month. > even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. I'm not aware of any services which will cost you money unless you actively enable them and create an object within it's class. Many services, such as S3, will attempt to force you into a "secured" configuration that avoids common traps by default. > For example, PostgreSQL is advertised as free, but "Aurora PostgreSQL" is quite costly. There's a rubric to the way AWS talks about it's internal services that is somewhat impenetrable at first. It's not too hard to figure out, though, if you take the time to read through their rather large set of documentation. That's the real price you must pay to successfully use the "free tier." Anyways.. PostgreSQL is an open source project. Amazon RDS is a managed service that can run instances of it. Amazon Aurora is a different service that provides it's own engine that is _compatible_ with MySQL and PostgreSQL. To know why you'd use one or the other, the shibboleth is "FAQ," so search for "AWS Aurora FAQ" and carefully read the whole page before you enable the service. |
I don't even know where I would start with that. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ lists documentation for 305 different products!