One of the biggest perks of being a student is the student discounts. BUT with great privilege comes great responsibility. In the middle of last year I had it in my mind that I wanted to explore what other career options were open to me besides “Software Developer”, and that’s where I stumbled upon the position of “DevOps Engineer”. Looking at all the job postings there was a cloud platform that was attached to it everywhere: ‘knowledge of AWS’. So I set out to learn AWS and got a student account. However, even though the student account was free, you must include a credit/debit card on file.
Fast forward to today. I get a charge on my card for $713.85 from AWS! In the time succeding that fateful decision, I went on to learn about DevOps and concluded that it wasn’t what I thought it was, and I learned how to interact with the cloud using GCP and preferred that wayyy more so I pretty much abandoned my AWS account, but kept it open because whenever I was about to, there was this caption on top basically saying “if you close this account your user name and email can’t be used forever”– I had it in my mind that someday I might need to use the account for whatever employer that used AWS so I should just keep it “just in case”. Because of me keeping it open and not really paying attention to it in the month prior, someone had hacked my account and raked up a charge that I was just seeing.
Now I had to cancel my credit card and open a dispute with AWS for the fraudulent charge. Even though there are ‘student account’ options for this service to learn how to use it, AWS especially as a platform is not ideal for a student to learn by themselves. Whatever password or sensitive information is on there needs to be encrypted. This goes for any promotion that has a special student rate–at some point it expires or you yourself neglects it and then things get really expensive really fast, so keep track of all your subscriptions, delete the ones you don’t use (especially if they make you keep your credit card on file), and know what you are getting into!
