Setting Up AWS Account

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up your AWS account. From the AWS Management Console, you can access a wide range of AWS services and start building and managing your cloud resources. However, setting up a new AWS account comes with the responsibility of ensuring security, cost management, and operational efficiency. In the rest of this lesson, we’ll detail some initial best practices to follow when setting up a new AWS account.

Create an IAM user

When we create an AWS account, it creates a root user account by default. Each account can only have one root user, which has unrestricted access to the resources within the account. We can log into the root user account using a username and password. However, using the root user account in AWS is discouraged as the root user has unrestricted access to all AWS resources and services, making it a security risk if the credentials are compromised. In addition, actions performed by the root user are not traceable to individual users, making it challenging to audit and monitor activity effectively.

To mitigate these risks and improve security posture, it is recommended to create users with limited permissions based on the principle of least privilege instead of using the root user. We can then assign these users only the permissions necessary to perform tasks, reducing the risk of unauthorized actions.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service enables us to manage access to AWS resources securely. IAM allows us to control who can access our AWS resources and what actions they can perform. Follow the steps below to create an IAM user:

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of security to our AWS account by requiring an additional verification method, typically a temporary code from a mobile app or a hardware token, in addition to a regular password. Here’s how to enable MFA for our AWS account:

Monitor and manage costs

It is important to implement cost management practices to monitor and optimize AWS spending. We can use AWS Cost Explorer to analyze usage and spending patterns, set up billing alerts to notify us of cost overruns and leverage AWS Budgets to set spending limits and track expenses. Here’s how you can set up a billing alarm to alert you when your AWS charges reach $10: