AWS Account – Open an Account

To work with Amazon AWS Services, you create an account and supply your credit card details.

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

Set a budget alert in case the account is compromised. It should be fine. We will cover the IAM service in another section where you set MFA authentication.

We will not go into multiple accounts and billing tags in these technical notes.

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 is not useful as it uses older hardware.

If your credit card expires, you receive a notice rather than the account not working. You go to your account and then pay manually. Amazon changes their website pages now and then. You can locate the billing transactions as you look around.

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

The Regions menu is used a lot – top right menu. When you are in the EC2 service menu, check the menu. For instance, in Australia we use Sydney (or Melbourne) and Oregon for email (SES service). A non-local region impacts your billing. If we use email S3 Buckets, these go to Oregon so that various Lambda functions work correctly. If using a 3rd party like MS Exchange we still use Amazon SES services in Oregon as a relay to the outside world for our domain in WordPress.

If creating an S3 bucket for storage (not email), you create it in your local region – keep costs minimal.
We can configure Amazon to forward emails, but we can;t reply from them with our domain, so we have to pay for a 3rd party service to use our domain name. If you receive few emails, forwarding is acceptable. At time of writing, we use Lambda functions with SDK V3 (node22+ at time of writing) rather than the older SDK2. More on this elsewhere.

If we use a Content Delivery Network, their SSL certificates are free, in North Virginia as our region. There is no point using a CDN if content is not going outside Australia (or your own local region).

Use of the Region menu

Here we see how to access services, such as EC2 to install and configure Linux. This need to pre-select the Region in the top left menu.

Creating the User Access Keys

Go to your IAM service. (Like the EC2 example above, just type in IAM to get this particular menu)