AWS getting started

Hey everyone I decided to do a series of technology articles. This will be the first of many articles hopefully. Your feedback and comments will be greatly appreciated. This first article will be about setting up an AWS account and configuring the AWS CLI environment. There will be more articles coming up covering additional nuances of AWS.

AWS Account Setup

1) Creating an account

Go to https://aws.amazon.com/free/ and look for the “create a free account” button on the left side of the page. This will navigate you to a new page with “?signup” in the URL. It will ask you for an email address to use as a root account password and an AWS account name to use for everyday use.

The root account is used for administrative functions and will have complete access to the AWS account and server you will be making. It is recommended to not use your root account for everyday tasks if you can help it. Make sure to use another account for daily use. Call it admin manager or whatever you like.

You will be brought to the next page which will ask you if you are using it for personal or professional use.

For business use,

They will then ask you for your full name, company name, phone number, country, and address.

For personal use,

they will ask you for your full name, phone number, country, and address.

The next page will ask you for a credit card number. They will charge you a one-dollar processing fee but will not charge you unless you use the paid tier. The advantage of AWS is the plethora of free tier options available

After you verify your credit card number it will ask to verify your phone number. After your account is finished and verified you will be asked what kind of plan you want. You have three options which are the basic (free) plan, the business plan, and the developer plan. The next page will welcome you to AWS services and will ask you about your role and what you are interested in. This is optional to fill out.

2)Creating an EC2 instance

Once your account is set up. Navigate to https://aws.amazon.com/console/ and log back into your account if they ask for it. You will see a Build a solution section and under it, you will see various options like launching a virtual machine, Building a web app, or registering a domain. For this tutorial, we are keeping it simple by launching a virtual machine.

Click the “launch a virtual machine” button which will navigate you to a new page. They will ask for some information about the machine you wish to create. They will ask for a virtual machine name, operating system/AMI (Amazon Machine Image), and to set up a key pair (for login) and storage options. Make sure to save the key pair and password for later. Since this is just for testing, select an ubuntu image or windows image and I recommend going for the free tier options for storage.

An AMI is a template that contains the software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications) required to launch your instance.

3)CLI configuration and setup

See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html for additional documentation for the AWS console.

For manual install

use curl "https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-cli/awscli-bundle.zip" -o "awscli-bundle.zip" unzip awscli-bundle.zip

sudo ./awscli-bundle/install -i /usr/local/aws -b /usr/local/bin/aws

For a simple easy install in Linux type in sudo apt install awscli

This works for Ubuntu Kali and Debian

For a simple install in windows go to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/v1/userguide/install-windows.html#msi-on-windows , Download the Windows MSI file and run the installer.