AWS Account – Open an Account

Opening an AWS Account

All examples are shown with Sydney as the primary AWS region.

The key things to edit or view are shown above. Your account number will be used in other AWS service settings elsewhere.

You should set a budget alert in case the account is compromised.

We will cover the IAM service in another lesson where you set MFA authentication, but always use a strong password.

I use the Microsoft authentication app on my phone.

We will not go into multiple accounts in these lessons.

You will want to configure the account for receiving PDF invoices to your email address.

You alternative contact is important if you ever cannot get into your account. In such a case you would contact Amazon AWS.

A new account is given 1 year of some free services, but this is neither here nor there.

If your credit card expires, you receive a notice rather than the account not working. You go to your account and find where you make a payment, as it then needs to be done manually.

Billing & Payments > Payments > Transactions (tab) shows all invoicing (with a filter) and ability to download a .CSV file.

If you pay GST, you enter Tax details with your ABN number, not your tax file number. ABN traders who do not pay GST do not fill this out.

The Regions menu is used a lot in your work. For example, if you go to the Search bar at the top and type in EC2, you can see a large menu with a black background, where you can click on EC2 services. That may take you to a different geographic region, so when you are in the EC2 service menu, check the Region menu at the top right, and select, for instance, Sydney. Learn to keep an eye on this always, as you do not want to be in the wrong region – that impacts your billing and website performance for your country.

As another important example, if you search on S3 buckets, this will take you to the Global menu, but when creating a storage bucket, you want your region. There is an exception to this. If using S3 buckets for e-mail, Australia is best suited to buckets being created in Oregon. E-mail is not provided in Australia. By searching Amazon documentation and Google, you can look for what region is best for your country for email. We would use what we call Amazon SES – configuring SMTP and E-mail forwarding services. We will configure these in the lessons as they are very handy if WordPress e-mail is forwarded through Amazon as a relay rather than directly to MS Exchange, or whatever service you use.

We should say upfront, if you use a reasonable number of e-mails for your website, Amazon forwarding is not professional enough. You should use a formal e-mail service.

Any use of Content Delivery Networks and their associated free SSL certificates are only done via North Virginia.

Use of the Region menu

Creating the User Access Keys