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Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu
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One of the more underappreciated AWS service

The most under-appreciated AWS service is the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). This service provides SSL/TLS certificate for your custom domain as long as you subscribe to any ACM-integrated service like Elastic Cache or Cloudfront. 

I had been using Wordpress to host my website https://aminsolutions.com for some time on a free web hosting provider. In order to provide SSL/TLS web encryption, I would have to buy a public certificate from an SSL provider and have that in front of my Wordpress content management web site. I found there were many limitations with that including installation of a public certificate on a free webhost subscription.  I would have had to start a paid web host subscription and in order to install a paid public certificate on a Wordpress website that wasn't getting a lot of hits. Regardless, it had to be secured via SSL web encryption so this is where AWS Cloudfront came in.

Using AWS Cloudfront integrated with ACM, I can get a free public SSL web certificate managed entirely by ACM as the Certificate Authority. I would only have to pay for AWS Cloudfront. The cost to subscribe to AWS Cloudfront was minimal for the number of hits I get to my site so I moved my DNS management to AWS Route 53 and added the DNS records to point to my Wordpress free web hosting provider. My costs was under $1/month to have this type of setup and I have the added benefit of have web acceleration and redundancy as part of AWS Cloudfront. 

Happy with this underappreciated ACM service.

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