Welcome

In this guide, we’ll talk through the set up of your AWS Educate starter account, installation of awscli, and configuration of awscli.

AWS Educate set up

You should have received an email that looks like this:

Click on the hyperlink to complete the application. This takes you to a sign up page like this:

Complete the sign up and agree to the terms of service:

You’ll receive an email at your Emory email address asking you to verify your email address:

Verify your address. Shortly after, you’ll receive another email saying your application was approved:

Click on the hyperlink to set your password (choose something secure!!!). Then you’ll be logged into your AWS educate account portal and should see the following header:

Click on “AWS Console” to provision your AWS account.

Click “Create Starter Account”. This will start the process of provisioning your account.

You may need to click “Refresh” after a few minutes or the page may automatically reload when completed. When completed, you’ll see this:

You’ll have this account for a year, or until you’ve spent all your free compute. Click on “AWS Starter Account” and agree to the terms:

Now, you should see a page that has this box on it:

We will come back to the “Account Details” button shortly, so keep this browser open.

Installing awscli

We will now install the AWS command line interface (awscli), which, as the name suggests, allows us to request AWS resources from the command line. Full instructions can be found here.

I will suggest installing using homebrew (for Mac or WSL2 [i.e., Ubuntu for Windows] users). However you install, make sure that you install version 2!!! If using homebrew, you can execute the following.

When the install is completed, you’ll see something like:

You can confirm the install was successful by checking whether the command aws can be found in your PATH.

Configuring awscli

We will now configure awscli to use your AWS account credentials. Typically, there would be an extra step here (setting up an IAM user); however, this isn’t an option on AWS Educate. We’ll discuss in class the role of IAM users.

We will configure using the command aws configure.

Go back to your AWS educate account and click on Account Details:

You will see something like this:

Click on “Show” to see your AWS Access Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key. IMPORTANT: Don’t show these to anyone else!!!! Copy the AWS Access Key ID over to your terminal and hit “Return”/“Enter”. Copy the AWS Secret Access Key and hit “Return”/“Enter”.

For region name, type us-east-1. The output format option controls the format of the output of awscli commands. If you are using awscli for advanced computing, it probably makes sense to select json or yaml, if you are only doing basic things, then I would go with table, which is more human readable, but can’t be easily used in scripts. For this class, it doesn’t really matter what you choose.

This whole process, just creates a couple files that (on a Mac) live in the ~/.aws directory. You can go and view the contents of those files to ensure that everything was entered properly.