Prerequisites and setup checklist - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- [Instructor] Before we build our automated document processing solution, let's quickly review what you need to have ready to get the most out of this course. This course is designed at an intermediate level, so you'll need a few skills beforehand. First, you'll need working knowledge of AWS, specifically how to create and manage resources, set permissions, and navigate the AWS console comfortably. You'll also need some coding experience, ideally in Python, because we'll create a few Lambda functions and automation scripts throughout the course. If you don't already have this experience, please check out the handout provided in the Exercise Files. It outlines resources that will help you gain the skills I mentioned if you're not familiar with them yet. However, if you're ready to take on the challenge, we'll walk through most of the process step by step, and you'll also have access to a GitHub repository containing all of the code needed to follow along. Now, to ensure you're ready to follow along with the building process outlined in this course, confirm that you have the following access and configurations on your local machine or AWS account. We'll also walk through installing the AWS CLI on your machine so it is ready to go when we begin interacting with AWS through the command line later in this course, You'll need an active AWS account with the appropriate permissions to use the services and create the resources covered in this course. If you don't already have an account, you can set one up now by visiting aws.amazon.com. When creating your AWS account, you'll be asked to provide payment information, but all services and usage in this course will remain within the Free tier. Your AWS account will need permissions to use services, like Identity and Access Management or IAM, Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, API Gateway, and DynamoDB. You'll also need access to the GitHub repository provided along with this course and your AWS CLI installed properly and configured, which we'll go through now. Let's install and configure the AWS CLI on your local machine. To get started, we'll need to head over to aws.amazon.com/cli. We'll scroll down and click on Get started, and on the left-hand pane under Get started, we'll click Install and Updates. We'll scroll down just a little bit under AWS CLI install and update instructions, and here, we'll find the install and update instructions for our specific operating system. However, if you're on a Mac or Linux, open your terminal and type pip install AWS CLI and hit Enter. Now we can verify our download by typing aws --version, and we can see our CLI version. And now we can see our CLI is installed, and we are running it on version 1.24.10. Now we'll need to log into the AWS Management console to get our access and secret keys for the AWS CLI configurations. So from the AWS Console Home, we'll head over to Identity and Access Management, and in the left hand pane under Access management, we will click on Users. We'll click on our username, and under our username, we'll click on Security credentials. We'll scroll down to Access keys and click on Create access key. Here, we'll select our use case, which is Command Line Interface, and scroll down, confirm that we understand the above recommendation, and click Next. We'll need to assign a description tag to our ID, so we can just title this our initials and AccessKey, and I'll click Create access key. Now we can download or copy the access key ID and the secret access key. Be sure to save them securely. Now we'll need to configure it. Within our terminal, we'll type aws configure and hit Enter. And now it's asking for our AWS access key ID, which we'll paste it and hit Enter. And then we'll copy over our secret key from the earlier step, and we'll paste it and hit Enter. My default region is already selected, which is us-east-1, so I can hit Enter there, or you can enter another region of your choice and hit Enter. And for the default output, I will select JSON and hit Enter. Now for a quick test, I can run aws s3 ls and Enter. If that works, you're ready. Now for the last thing before proceeding with the course, I suggest setting up an AWS budget to keep track of your cost, as we'll be using AWS services, like Textract and Comprehend. While we won't be covering setting up the AWS budget here, as it's outside of the scope of this course, there's a link provided in the handout in the Exercise Files for you to check out. Let's jump in and start building.