tl;dr: In this guide I'll talk you through step-by-step how to sign up for an AWS account so you can start practicing with AWS services
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform hosts most of the worlds largest and well-known applications and systems, which means the likelihood of you encountering it in your professional career as any type of software engineer, is pretty high.
Knowing how to create an AWS account probably isn’t a skill that you’re going to use when working at a company (unless you’re a DevOps Engineer or SRE) but knowing how to use the services within is, and you can’t practice using those services without first creating your own AWS account, so lets do that real quick.
You do require a few key things in order to successfully create an account, these being:
Pretty simple, this email will become the root account
email address for the AWS account, so make sure it’s one that you don’t mind using for something like this.
Once you give them an email address, they will send it a code, and boom, email confirmed.
Again, easy peasy.
This could potentially be a hard stop for some people, especially young people looking to learn so make sure you ask your parents for this part.
AWS will take $1 from your bank account in order to verify that the account is active and chargable, don’t freak out, it’s real.
For some reason AWS will now “Verify your identity” by texting you a code, I’m not sure exactly how this verifies your identity but it’s simple enough. I’m also not sure why they decide to do this at this stage and not in step 2 when you first gave it to them, as you also have to type it in again in step 4.
i don’t like typing the same thing in twice
In the final step you’ll be given 3 options to pick from, pick the first / left most package which is the free package, I’m sure this final step is just a way for Amazon to potentially get you to pay some more money but don’t do it.
At this point you’ll be sent back to the login page where you can login to your account, theres 2 important things that I would recommend you do at this point before you start to play around.
It’s bad practice to use the root account (the initial account that is created for you) for day to day actions, the root account is the key to the kingdom and shouldn’t be used to just created EC2 instances etc. Create a nice new one with a fun name and use that for your day to day learning.
If you want to learn about AWS more in depth then roadmap.sh have a nice AWS roadmap ✌️