Mission Setting: The Gateway Planet
Planet Emerald was AWS Student Builder Group PUP’s entry point into their ‘AWS Universe’ themed event series — a virtual session open to the entire student body, built around one mission: getting every builder properly set up and secured on AWS from day one.
The space theme was intentional:
- Planet Emerald as the gateway planet.
- The AWS Management Console as the command center.
- AWS IAM as the security airlocks. It framed cloud infrastructure as navigable and intentional rather than intimidating.
Security Architecture: Zero-Trust from Day One
The session balanced conceptual foundations with live terminal and console execution:
- Foundations & Free Tier (Co-Speaker Roan Manansala) — Explaining global infrastructure across Regions and Availability Zones, student credit allocations, and billing structures.
- Live Security Hardening Walkthrough (Nathan Flores) — Setting up budget alerts and zero-dollar billing notifications before provisioning resources, locking down root user credentials, enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and creating fine-grained IAM roles following the principle of least privilege.
Building these habits on day one is what distinguishes confident cloud builders from those who receive surprise bills at month-end.