Put the spending controls in place before you create anything

short · 35 min

Task

Configure the guards first, on an account with nothing in it. This is the only lab in the course that must be done before any other, because every control here is one that cannot be applied retroactively to money already spent.

Steps

  1. Create a monthly budget at a figure you would be annoyed but not hurt by, with an alert at 50% of it and a second on FORECAST spend. Record the two threshold values in lab/budget.txt.
  2. Find the service quota for your provider's general-purpose instance type in your default region and lower it to something small -- two or three. Write the before and after values into lab/quota.txt. This is the only control in the lab that PREVENTS rather than notifies.
  3. Decide a three-key tag scheme (owner, purpose, expires) and write it into lab/tagging.md with one worked example value per key.
  4. Write lab/teardown.md: the exact command or console path that destroys everything this course creates, and the filter you will run afterwards to confirm nothing tagged with your owner value remains.
  5. Install a hypervisor and a container runtime locally, and record their versions in lab/local-tools.txt. Most labs in this course need these and no provider at all.

Verify

test -s lab/budget.txt && grep -ci forecast lab/budget.txt
awk 'END{print NR" line(s) in quota record"}' lab/quota.txt
grep -c '^' lab/tagging.md lab/teardown.md lab/local-tools.txt

The forecast count must be at least 1: an alert on actual spend alone tells you after the money is gone. lab/quota.txt must record two different numbers, or you have not actually lowered a limit.

Notes

A budget alert NOTIFIES and a quota PREVENTS. If you finish this lab with only the budget configured, you have built a smoke detector and no fire door.

This is an independent study companion for CompTIA Cloud+ CV0-004 and is not produced by or endorsed by CompTIA.