Account Setup

An AWS account is required to begin provisioning cloud resources. While the process is rather straightforward, instructions are provided below for additional guidance.

Instructions

1. Navigate to the AWS homepage and select the “Create an AWS Account” option in the page header.

2. Enter a preffered email address for the AWS account.

3. Provide the Account owner address and contact information. For the purpose of these tutorials, choose to configure a “personal” AWS account.

4. Supply credit/debit card information for billing purposes.

5. Complete the phone number verification process.

6. Afterwards, readers should recieve a confirmation email once the submitted account information is verified. This may take as long as two days.

7. Once verification is complete, verify that login is functioning for the root AWS account here using the credentials created in step #1.

Programatic Credentials

After successfully setting up an account, AWS automatically creates a default user entity known as the root user, which has unlimited access to all cloud resources. Because of this, it is considered best practice to create a separate AWS user for development and rectrict access to the root user. The folowing instructions cover enabling MFA (multi-factor authentication) to secure access to the root user and creating a separate developer user with programtic credentials for the AWS CLI and SDK.

Activate MFA for Root Account

1. Log into the AWS console. Type “IAM” into the top search bar and click on the first result from the dropdown.

2. On the IAM dashboard, select the option to configure MFA on the root account.

3. Select “Virtual MFA Device” for the MFA type.

   Info

   You can download the Google Authenticator app for both Android and iOS.

4. Scan the resulting QR code and enter the two resulting codes.

   Info

   It may be beneficial to save a screenshot of the QR code image. In the event that readers lose their MFA device, MFA can then be easily reconfigured on a separate device.

Create Administrator User

1. Within the IAM menu, go to the users tab and press the “Add Users”

2. Select both “Programatic access” and “AWS Management Console access” options. Enter an AWS console password and unselect “Require password reset”

3. Under “Attach existing policies directly”, check “Aministrator Access”.

4. Skip the tags section and click Create User

5. After the user is generated, click “Download .csv” to download the access and secret key pair and a user-specific sign-in URL.

   Warning

   Credentials are only available for download immediately after generation. Afterwards, the credentials will be unrecoverable.

CLI

AWS provides a CLI tool for facilitating the invocation of cloud APIs, leveraging a user’s local credentials.

The following instructions target version 2 of the AWS CLI. For version 1, see these instructions. Note that these versions are not backwards compatible.

Instructions

1. Download and install the CLI for the desired operating system:

   Windows MacOS Linux

   Download and run the CLI installer.

   User Interface:

   Download the latest pkg file here and double-click to install.

   Command Line:

   Execute the following:

   $ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2.pkg" -o "AWSCLIV2.pkg"
   $ sudo installer -pkg AWSCLIV2.pkg -target /
   

   For x86 (64-bit) distributions:

   $ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
   $ unzip awscliv2.zip
   $ sudo ./aws/install
   

   For ARM distributions, execute the following:

   $ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-aarch64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
   $ unzip awscliv2.zip
   $ sudo ./aws/install
   

2. Run the following too confirm that the CLI has been successfully installed:

   CLI

   Command

   aws --version
   

   Output

   aws-cli/2.5.8 Python/3.9.11 Windows/10 exe/AMD64 prompt/off
   

3. Run the following and enter the credentials downloaded from the previous section when prompted. This will enable the CLI to authenitcate with AWS services.

   CLI

   Command

   aws configure
   

   Interactive Prompt

   AWS Access Key ID [None]: access-key-value-here
   AWS Secret Access Key [None]: secret-key-value-here
   Default region name [None]: us-east-1
   Default output format [None]:
   

4. Run the following to ensure the CLI is properly configured, which will return the active user and account information.

   CLI

   Command

   aws sts get-caller-identity
   

   Output

   {
       "UserId": "BIDAYGZ7AN44NDI6LOIG4",
       "Account": "012345678910",
       "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::012345678910:user/username"
   }