Week 6 Worklog

Week 6 Objectives:

  • Understand security concepts and cost management in AWS.
  • Practice IAM Policies, KMS, and Secrets Manager to secure resources.
  • Monitor, analyze, and alert on usage costs using Billing & Cost Explorer.

Tasks to be carried out this week:

DayTaskStart DateCompletion DateReference Material
2- Review basic IAM concepts
- Learn advanced IAM Policy (JSON structure, Effect, Action, Resource, Condition)
- Create custom policies and attach to user/group
13/10/202513/10/2025AWS Journey
3- Introduce AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
- Create a Customer Managed Key (CMK) and test file encryption/decryption
- Apply KMS to encrypt S3 buckets or EBS volumes
14/10/202514/10/2025AWS Journey
4- Get familiar with AWS Secrets Manager
- Create a secret to store database credentials
- Write a small Lambda script to read secrets from Secrets Manager
15/10/202515/10/2025AWS Journey
5- Explore the AWS Billing Dashboard and Cost Explorer
- View costs by service, region and time
- Configure Cost Anomaly Detection
16/10/202516/10/2025AWS Journey
6- Create AWS Budgets and configure email alerts
- Write a weekly cost summary and propose optimizations (stop unused EC2, cleanup EBS, reduce log retention, etc.)
- Week 6 summary
17/10/202517/10/2025AWS Journey

Week 6 Achievements:

  • Mastered creating and applying advanced IAM Policies to control resource access.

  • Understood KMS encryption mechanisms and applied them to S3 and EBS.

  • Deployed Secrets Manager to protect sensitive information, accessible from Lambda.

  • Monitored costs and configured alerts with Cost Explorer and Budgets.

  • Learned how to analyze costs, recommend optimizations, and maintain security in parallel.