From the course: Complete Guide to AWS Software Deployment

Initial setup

- [Instructor] If you want to create an AWS account to follow along with this course, it only takes a few steps. Just head to aws.amazon.com and click Create an AWS Account. Alternatively, you can click the Get started for free button and learn a little bit about the AWS Free Tier. If you're a first time AWS user, some of the resources we create during this course are eligible for the free tier. However, we will probably incur some charges. AWS instance time can be cheap, fractions of a cent per hour in some cases, but they can add up over time. To make sure you're not charged for anything beyond what you use in this course, make sure to watch the tear down videos at the end of each section. Still, I'd invite you to check out the AWS Free Tier documentation to understand the ways that you can maximize the opportunities to learn without costing anything. From here, click Create a Free Account. You'll head to this page which kicks off a short workflow where you give AWS details about yourself, set up a password, and give credit card information so AWS knows where to charge as you create resources that do cost money. Once you've activated your new account, you'll be ready to log in. You can always head back to aws.amazon.com and click the Sign In button here in the top. From here, you're given a choice, and you can sign in as the root user, which will be the account that you just created, if this is a new course, or an IAM user. The root user has full privileges on your account to create any kind of resource and manage billing information and all of the account level metadata. It's a very powerful account. And generally speaking, we don't want to use it as we do things over time. You'll see in this course, we'll occasionally create IAM users so that we can scope privileges down to just what we need an account to do for the given task. For now, we'll use the root login, and give our password. And we'll arrive at the AWS Console Home. Now, we'll explore this in detail in the next video, but first, I want to suggest one essential task in securing your account. We've just logged in as the root user. And even though it's great to use IAM users, if you're going to use root for anything, we should put multifactor authentication on it. Click into IAM, or search IAM in this top search bar, click IAM, and you are taken into the Identity and Access Management Dashboard. You'll have this option front and center to add MFA for the root user. Click Add MFA, and you'll be given instructions on how to set up an app like Duo or Okta Authenticate or Google Authenticator to add a second factor to logging in with this root account. I highly recommend that you do it because that root account is a very powerful thing, and there are attackers out there that would just love to get ahold of it to spin up resources in your account to do things like mining cryptocurrency, whatever they may want to get up to. So like any account that you hold at your bank or any other online account, adding MFA is a great step. So I suggest you do that. And then the next video, we'll explore the Home Management Console in even more detail.

Contents