Creating an AWS account

Please note that an Amazon account and AWS are completely unrelated things, so even if you already have an Amazon account, you still need to go through this step.

What will we do here?

• Figure out the free tier and how it will help us discover the AWS ecosystem.

• Register your first AWS account and login into the console.

What is the AWS free tier?

The first good thing about AWS is that it provides 12 months of free usage quota for most of the available services, including those we will use daily.

Even though free usage is limited, it's more than enough to tackle and learn everything we need.

You can look at the per-service limits on the free tier page.

Prerequisites for registering an account

The following things are required to start the course and register your AWS account:

• A phone number that can receive SMS messages (for verification)

• Valid credit card

Despite the fact that after registration, all AWS accounts have a 12-month tier, we strongly recommend using a card with no money or with a low balance.

Register your AWS account

Before we get started with AWS, we need to create our first account. The registration process is very similar to registering on any other service and requires linking your credit card.

Step 1. Go to AWS landing page and start the registration process

Open aws.amazon.com and click on Create an AWS Account button at the top right corner.

Then enter your email and specify the account name. The account name is not your name and is used for easier visual account identification, so essentially you can put anything into this field.

After verifying your email, follow all further steps (personal information, billing address, credit card info, etc.) and finish the sign-up process.

Step 2. Sign in into your account with root access

Congratulations! Your AWS account is eligible for free tier usage during the next 12 months.

Now you can sign in to the AWS console. Open the sign-in page, select Root user, and enter your credentials.

Root account usage and security

Cool, our AWS account is ready, and we can access the UI console. But there is one small problem.

Consider your root user as the root user in Linux-based systems. When should you use the root user? Almost never.

The root account is useful mostly for managing billing details and reading billing reports. We will use IAM user for other day-to-day tasks, and we'll talk more about it in the next section.

For now, let's configure 2-factor auth for your account and then forget that you have the root access (but remember the password, that is still important to know😄).

Configure multi-factor authentication

AWS supports all the most common MFA providers like Twilio Authy and Google Authenticator.

From the UI console dashboard, open the IAM dashboard by typing IAM in the header search box.

There you will see the Security recommendations with Add MFA button. On the next page, hit the Activate MFA button, specify the device name, and select the Virtual MFA device type. Then follow the process based on the MFA provider of your choice.

What's next?

Congratulations on the first steps with AWS! You have created your AWS account and secured the root user. In our next sections, we'll take a deeper look at the IAM service and configure our access correctly.