Intro to AWS

Amazon is currently the undisputed king of cloud infrastructure and it is growing very rapidly as well. One of the major reason for its success is the wide plethora of the services it offers. Here are some of the popular services it currently offers:

• Amazon EC2 : This is your virtual server which you can get for free or rent, based on your configuration and usage. This server can be a flavor of Linux OS or a Windows server OS. You can login into this server either by SSH or RDP. You can host any application or service on this server and use its public DNS name to connect to the hosted application.
• Amazon S3 : This is the storage service on the cloud provided by AWS. You can store any kind of data in S3 bucket. You can upload and download the data from S3 bucket using AWS console or AWS CLI or via the APIs provided.
• Amazon RDS : This is the database on the cloud. The RDS service provides auto backup, software patching, automatic failure detection and recovery along with other features which makes it pretty scale-able.
• AWS Lambda : Lambdas are functions running on the cloud. You can write code on the AWS console or upload a zip file of your code along with supporting libraries and trigger the function from various triggers.
• Amazon VPC : Amazon Virtual Private Cloud helps in securing your services by making them private and isolating the code into logical sections inside AWS Cloud.
• AWS Security group, IAM and Cognito help in securing the hosted application.Security group helps in managing in bound and out bound connections to the code. IAM controls the user and the role each user has thus preventing unauthorized access. Cognito provides authentication service which help in login and sign in for your services.

There are many many other services provided by AWS which helps in creating a complete solution on the cloud. But lets first see how we can create an AWS account and get started.

If you do not have an AWS account, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ and click on the ‘Create an AWS account’ at the top right corner which will re-direct you to sign up page. You will be asked to enter your credit card details to complete your account creation but you will not be charged for 12 months if you use the free tier eligible services.

Once the account creation is successful, the recommendation is to create a new IAM user and not use the current login credentials. The current login credentials are called the ‘ root account credentials’ and will have unrestricted access to all services inside AWS. You can create an IAM user with restricted access so that you dont do something which can charge you a lot. To do this, go to services and search for IAM.

Click on Users on the left and then on Add user to create new IAM user.

You can give programmatic access to the user if you intend to use the user with CLI or AWS SDK, else console access would be sufficient to log in into console.

Next you can provide access to the user by assigning the user to already created groups with specific permission or you can copy permission from existing user or assign existing policies directly. For the first IAM user, you can select the existing policies and select Administrator Access so that the user has access to most of the services.

Next you can add tags to the user for easy searching of the user. You can use the tags to organize, track, or control access for this user and is optional to add. Click on Next to review and create the IAM user.

Once created, note down the URL which you can use to login to the console and the secret access key as the access key will be shown only once.

Now you are ready to login and use various services provided by AWS. Also please follow the 5 steps mentioned in the IAM page to secure your AWS account. In the next post, we will learn to create a simple HTML file and host it on EC2.