Setting up an Account

1

Go to the Amazon S3 home page.

2

Click the Sign up for this service button.

If you don't already have an AWS account, you will be prompted to create one as part of the sign up process.

1

Log into your AWS account and follow the link to Amazon EC2 under the Browse Web Services section on the left.

2

Click Sign Up For Web Service in the top right of the screen and follow the on-screen instructions.

1

Point to the button labeled Your Web Services Account and select the View Access Key Identifiers link on the menu that appears.

2

Click Create New in the Your X.509 Certificate section to create a new X.509 certificate.

3

Save the certificate and private key. You'll need this when you set up our command line tools (see Setting up the Tools).

4

Create a .ec2 directory in your home directory, and save these files to it with the filenames offered by your browser. You should end up with a PEM-encoded X509 certificate and a private key file named as shown in the following examples.

The following is an example of a PEM encoded signed X.509 certificate.

cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem

The following is an example of an unencrypted, PEM encoded RSA private key that corresponds to the preceding X.509 certificate.

pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem

This X.509 certificate is associated with your account until you generate or upload a new certificate. If you have an existing certificate that you prefer to use, you can return to the Access Key Identifiers upload it later.

5

Finally, you'll need to look up your AWS account ID. You should use this value whenever you need to provide an EC2 user ID. From the AWS portal page, point to Your Web Services Account and select the Account Activity link on the menu that appears. At the top of this page, locate your the Account Number which is a hyphenated number that looks similar to 4952-1993-3132. This number, with the hyphens removed, is your AWS account ID. In this example, it is 495219933132.