How to Supercharge Your Cloud Learning with AWS Credits

If you're studying computer science, engineering, or anything tech-related, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of those things that gets harder and harder to ignore. You know the cloud holds immense potential for your projects, but the barriers are real. Maybe you’ve braved a sweaty, overheated computer lab at peak hours, waiting your turn on sluggish machines to access a departmental AWS account. Maybe you’ve spent hours tweaking code on your own laptop, only to feel it get hotter than a coffee warmer the moment you try to run something more demanding.

Sure, you can scrape by with the free tier or fight for a slice of the department’s limited resources, but that makes it tough to truly explore AWS. Experimenting, learning, and building projects you care about is frustrating when you're constantly hitting restrictions. Yet, mastering AWS is a game-changer—powering startups, big tech firms, and even the streaming service you watch when you should be revising. It unlocks huge potential for personal projects and gives you a competitive edge in job applications, showing you’ve gone beyond coursework.

So, what’s the solution??

Why Have Your Own AWS Account?

The obvious answer is to get your own AWS account. Universities often provide cloud access through shared department resources, but that can feel like borrowing the family car—useful, but with restrictions. Having your own AWS account is like getting your own set of keys, giving you the freedom to experiment without limits:

• Full Control – With your own account, you can explore AI, serverless computing, and more—without university restrictions.
• No Fighting for Resources –Shared accounts have quotas, so with your own account and credits, you get full access whenever you need it.
• It’s Yours, Forever – Departmental accounts expire, but your personal AWS account stays with you—keeping your projects live and portfolio-ready.

So, suppose you’ve finally signed up and got yourself some credits, what can you actually do with them? Let’s dive in.

Six Cool Things You Can Build with AWS

1. Create Your Own Personal Backup Vault

Where to begin? Well, let's start with a simple but really effective example. Every student has files they can't afford to lose—photos, coursework, code, maybe even those half-finished novels or your meticulously curated D&D campaign notes. AWS S3 Deep Archive is a low-cost storage option designed for long-term data archiving, perfect for stashing away important files you don’t need every day, but don’t want to risk losing.

What can you do?

1. Use Amazon S3 Deep Archive to store critical backups at minimal cost.
2. Set up S3 lifecycle policies to automatically move older data into cheaper storage classes.
3. Add versioning and encryption to keep your backups secure and recoverable.

With a simple setup, you can build your own DIY backup system that’s far more resilient than relying on a USB stick or hoping your laptop doesn’t die the night before a deadline. And, not only that, you’ll simultaneously be getting to know AWS a whole lot better along the way as well.

2. Train Your Own AI Model (Without Melting Your Laptop)

If you’ve ever tried running a machine learning model on a standard laptop, you’ll know it’s a bit like asking a hamster to power a fridge—it’s technically possible, but things are going to go badly, very quickly. Most student-level laptops lack sufficient processing capacity and RAM to make things happen.

Enter cloud GPUs and services like AWS SageMaker and AWS Bedrock. These tools let you develop and fine-tune AI models on state-of-the-art virtual hardware, meaning you can play around with AI without your fan screaming like it's about to take off.

Practical applications?

• Fine-tune an AWS Bedrock model with your notes and course material to generate summaries, helping you identify key insights and shorten exam prep time.
• Build a simple image recognition model using AWS SageMaker— maybe one that can sort your holiday photos by location, or an AI that detects whether your housemate has stolen your milk again.
• Experiment with NLP (Natural Language Processing) using AWS Comprehend to analyse sentiment in tweets or customer reviews (or the feedback from your tutors, if you're not sure what they're really trying to say).

3. Host Your Own Website or Portfolio for Free

Every tech student needs a portfolio. Whether you’re applying for jobs, internships, or just want a professional place to showcase your projects, a personal website is essential. AWS makes it surprisingly easy to set one up. AWS Amplify is a great all-in-one service for deploying and hosting full-stack applications, while S3 + CloudFront is ideal for static sites. AWS Route 53 can also handle domain management seamlessly.

What could you build?

• A personal blog about your projects, ideas, and (if you’re brave) the horror stories of debugging at 3 AM, all hosted on AWS Amplify with AWS Lambda functions for dynamic content.
• An online CV with interactive elements—because let’s be honest, a PDF is a bit old school, powered by Amazon S3 for static content and AWS CloudFront for fast delivery.
• A project showcase site with embedded demos of your work, using AWS Lightsail to host your web apps or Amazon EC2 instances for more control, plus integration with GitHub Pages for quick project deployment.

Overall, building something like this is the perfect way to become familiar with core AWS services and how they interact—giving you hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure that’s highly valuable in the tech industry. As a humble-brag personal example from back in the day when you couldn’t just pick a CMS off the peg (and I had no money anyway), I taught myself PHP and mySQL by building one from scratch — and I still think it’s one of the best things that I’ve done.

• Using AWS Lambda to power a serverless event management platform

4. Build an App or Process Your Own Data

If you want to take one step up from hosting a website, remember that AWS isn’t just for running pre-built software—it’s a playground for creating your own applications. Let’s say you have a niche interest, like tracking every coffee you drink to find the optimal caffeine-to-productivity ratio. With AWS, you can:

• Store data in DynamoDB (a fast, scalable database).
• Process it with AWS Lambda (serverless functions, so you don’t have to manage servers yourself).
• Build a simple API with API Gateway, allowing you to pull up your coffee consumption trends in a neat little dashboard.

Alternatively, if you’re into data science, you can use AWS to process your own datasets rather than working with generic ones from online tutorials. Whether it's analysing your Spotify listening habits, tracking sports performance, or even parsing your own text messages (responsibly), AWS makes large-scale data processing accessible.

5. Run Big Data Experiments Without Needing a Supercomputer

Talking about data — ever tried running a large-scale data analysis project on a standard laptop? It’s about as fun as watching paint dry—only with more lag and occasional system crashes. AWS offers cloud-based data processing tools that let you handle huge datasets without needing a top-tier workstation.

1. AWS Athena lets you run SQL queries on massive datasets directly from S3 storage—no servers required.
2. AWS Glue automates data preparation, so you can clean and transform raw data without manually writing scripts.
3. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that lets you analyse terabytes of information efficiently.

One obvious thing is to run your analysis on data that you have to hand, but why stop at personal projects? AWS opens the door to large-scale analysis using public datasets. Ever wondered how global weather patterns shift over decades? Or how satellite imagery can track deforestation in real time? AWS provides access to public repositories like NASA Earth Data, genomics datasets, and historical financial market data, enabling you to take on ambitious questions that would be impossible with a single laptop.

So, whether you’re crunching climate trends, analysing open census data, or mapping global shipping routes, AWS offers the computing power to mine insights from vast datasets. The limits are few—it’s just a matter of discovering the hidden secrets within!

6. Set Up a Cybersecurity Lab to Hack (Ethically!)

Finally, here’s a good one that you might not have thought of: If you’re interested in cybersecurity, AWS gives you a safe environment to test security measures and explore penetration testing—without accidentally bringing down your university’s network (which, to be clear, is a very bad idea).

What can you do?

1. Use AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) to understand access control and best security practices.
2. Set up a private EC2 instance for ethical hacking exercises—test vulnerabilities without breaking any laws.
3. Learn about AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) to see how real-world attack mitigation works.

If you're planning to go into ethical hacking, cloud security, or DevSecOps, getting hands-on experience in a safe, legal environment is invaluable —not only because ‘I was just testing it for research’ doesn’t hold up as a defence when campus IT comes knocking!

• Securing APIs in an AWS Cloud Environment

How to Get Started with AWS Credits

Whilst Amazon isn’t just handing out free cash for fun, they do offer various student-friendly programs:

1. AWS Educate – Free access to cloud resources, perfect for beginners.
2. AWS Academy – University partnerships that provide structured learning resources.
3. AWS Activate for Startups – If you’re working on a startup idea, you might qualify for even more free credits with AWS Credits packages.

Last but not least, whisper it amongst yourselves, but if you happen to meet PCG at an event then be sure to talk to us very nicely. Who knows, if we really like you (don’t worry, we’re easy to please), we might even manage to sort you out with some of your very own free credits to put to good use.

Final Thoughts: Have Fun, Build, and Learn

AWS isn’t just for massive corporations—it’s an incredible tool for students who want to experiment, learn, and build real-world projects. Whether you’re training an AI model, hosting your own website, crunching big data, or experimenting with cybersecurity, AWS credits give you the freedom to explore without limitations.

So, what are you waiting for? Get your hands on some AWS credits and start building something that actually excites you. Who knows—your next side project could turn into the thing that lands you your dream job.