Free AWS Services that you can use to bootstrap your startup

RDS

AWS Relational Database Service is a managed Relational DBs service provided by AWS that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It can shed the maintenance, backup and scaling load off your shoulders and you can focus more on the development.

precautions to take for billing:

1. If you have scheduled daily backups then you will be billed for every backup snapshot on the basis of your database size
2. in free tier you can only use db.t2.micro instance and not their customized Aurora DB which is more performant and optimized

SQS

AWS Simple Queue Service is a managed message queues for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

precautions to take for billing:

1. SQS works on polling so you will be billed for polling on SQS even if there is no activity on you SQS. Meaning, higher the number of queues getting polled more will be the billing. But SQS provides 1 million free request every month so it won’t be a problem and it is also very cheap afterwards, $0.40 for 1 million requests.

AWS S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a storage service that offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Basically it is used to store the heavy data of your website like images, videos, documents, logs etc that would be costly if you store them in the main machine where your server is hosted.

You can even host static websites on an S3 bucket. See this blog post on how to deploy your React app to Amazon Web Services S3 and CloudFront. If you are looking to add a custom domain, HTTPS and continuous deployment see this blog post.

precautions to take for billing:

1. You should always set cache headers for your images in S3, other wise you will be billed for every request on your S3 bucket. Put less frequently consumed data in S3 glacier storage to reduce cost.

lambda

AWS Lambda works on Function as a service (FaaS) model, that lets you run your own code on Amazon’s servers, so you don’t need to host the code yourself. Best of all, you don’t pay a dime when your code isn’t being used. You only pay for computation time. Your code can sit on the server for months, and if you don’t touch it, Amazon doesn’t charge you.

So, you can host your REST APIs or any other event-based architecture on a lambda function and you will be charged only when there is traffic on your APIs. You can also use it to decouple some of the processing in your APIs and let lambda functions do the heavy lifting.

For example : Invoice generation, image processing, sending emails/ SMS etc.

precautions to take for billing:

1. use lambda functions to process jobs that shouldn’t be delayed and needs to be processed instantly. Do not use lambda for Complex Processing & Long Processing Tasks as they can get timed out and tried again which will only increase your billing. Lambda bills you for every second your code executes and also for the system configuration done by you like RAM size, processing power etc.

SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications

use SNS if you want to implement publisher subscriber communication model. You can subscribe to SNS notifications directly from lambda or via SQS queues which in turn are polled by lambda functions.

A typical setup for SNS, SQS and lambda