Amazon Web Services

— 2 minute read

Learn some basics of how to setup an Amazon Amazon Web Services account.

Go ahead and sign-up for an AWS account.

Next, you need to configure tokens which allow access to your AWS account. In ~/.aws/ folder, create a credentials file. You can setup as many different accounts as you like. I would recommend using the account name instead of relying on the default – you don’t want to run command on the wrong account!

[default]
  aws_access_key_id = <KEY_ID>
  aws_secret_access_key = <ACCESS_KEY>

[your-site]
  aws_access_key_id = <KEY_ID>
  aws_secret_access_key = <ACCESS_KEY>

[another-site]
  aws_access_key_id = <KEY_ID>
  aws_secret_access_key = <ACCESS_KEY>

Config

In ~/.aws/ folder, create a config file. You can add some defaults, such as the AWS region you want to use.

[default]
  region = eu-west-1

S3

S3 is a file storage solution. You can see how many “buckets” you have by running the following

aws s3 ls

Let’s break that down; aws is the application we’re using, s3 is the service on AWS and ls is the standard List command. This will return the names of the buckets you have created on the account.