Installation and Setup

You will need an AWS account in order to follow the examples in this book. Since the account is free to open, you need not worry about payment for now. However, the free tier has defined usage limits for specific services. If your usage of these services exceeds the monthly quota for 12 months, you will need to pay the pay-as-you-go AWS service rates.

In this chapter, we will describe the process of opening an AWS account, including adding your payment information. Then we will discuss the free tier and demonstrate all the things you can do for free in the first year and beyond. Finally, we will introduce you to the AWS Management Console.

Here are the topics we'll cover:

Creating an AWS account
The free tier
The AWS Management Console

Let's begin by showing you how to open your AWS account.

Opening an AWS account

In this section, we're going to describe how to sign up for an AWS account and add your payment information:

Begin by visiting https://aws.amazon.com/free/:

You can see there are different categories available in the free-tier:

FEATURED
12 MONTHS FREE
ALWAYS FREE
TRIALS
PRODUCT CATEGORIES

You can find more details about AWS Free Tier (Non-expiring Offers) for products such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Cognito, Amazon CodeCommit, AWS Lambda, and so on can be found on https://aws.amazon.com/free/. You will also get to know about AWS Free Tier (12 Month Introductory Period) offers for products such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon CloudFront and so on. Furthermore you can also check what AWS Free Tier (12 Month Introductory Period) offers for products such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon CloudDirectory, AWS IOT, and so on, on the same page.

Click Create an AWS Account, or Create a Free Account (either button will take you to the same place).
Select the tier with the 12 Months Free option.
Now enter your email address, and choose a password and AWS account name. Click on Continue.
Fill in your contact information by selecting an Account type. You will probably want to make this a personal account, so click Personal. Now enter your Full name again, select your Country/Region, and enter your Address and your Phone number:

Provide City, and Postal code, details check the agreement details, and click on Create Account and Continue. You probably should review this first, and when you are satisfied, then click Create Account and Continue.

Next, enter your credit card number. Even though this is a free account, you still need to provide billing information. Once you have filled in your credit card information, click on Continue. Provide Payment Information and Authenticate Transaction details:

To verify your information, you need to let AWS call you. So, enter your phone number, and then click Call Me Now:

You will receive a phone call giving you a PIN number, which you need to enter on the screen:

After your identity is verified, click Continue:

After the phone call, and your identity has been verified, click Continue the select your support plan:

The next screen lets you Personalize Your Experience. Select a role and the service you'are interested in services:

Congratulations, you now have an AWS account! A confirmation message will be sent to your email address.

The AWS Management Console

Now that you have an AWS account, you're ready to begin using the Management Console. In this section, we're going to describe three ways to log into the Console, navigating, viewing your build, and switching between regions.

You can log into the console by visiting https://aws.amazon.com/ and clicking Sign In to the Console:

If your screen looks like the following screenshot, then you are signing in with your root account credentials. Simply enter an e-mail address and click on Next:

Enter the password you used when you created your AWS account, and click the Sign In button:

If you are signing in as an IAM user, your screen will look like the following:

IAM users are created in the console to grant login and management permissions to others. If you would rather log in as your root account, click the link under Sign In that reads Sign-in using root account credentials.

Otherwise, click Sign In after you enter your username and password.

After you log in, you will see the dashboard:

The dashboard is a quick way to locate AWS services.

The Services menu is another way to locate AWS services:

It includes a recent History of services used, and more detailed descriptions of services.

Next, under the Edit icon, any services that you use frequently can be dragged to the top bar, where you can easily find them:

If you click on your name, you will see a submenu that will allow you to access your billing information:

This is where you find your AWS charges for this month the last month, and also a projection of next month's charges:

Next to your name, you will see a drop down for region selection:

Some services, such as billing, IAM, CloudFront, and Route 53, do not require you to select a region. However, most other services will require you to select a region from this drop-down.

You can close the account from My Billing Dashboard:

AWS free tier does not automatically expire at the end of your 12-month term. However, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server Web, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server Standard, Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 64-bit for Cluster Instances, and Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 SQL Server 64-bit for Cluster Instances are not eligible for the free tier. Currently, the free tier is not available in the China (Beijing) region.