Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) : Part 1: Sign Up

Amazon EC2 is  is a web service offered by Amazon that provides resizable compute capacity in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. The newly introduced AWS Free Usage Tier provides a very nice playground for developers like me to get their hand on Amazon EC2 for a test drive.

• Create an account. You can sign in with your existing Amazon account or create a new one. You need to provide payment/credit card information during registration. They will use the phone number you provided to verify your identity. After you click the Call Me Know button, it will display a pin number on the screen. An automated system will dial your number and ask you to enter the pin number through your phone.

• After your account is created and activated, you need to log into your account to obtain your Access Identifiers to make valid web service requests. There are three types of security credentials associated with your Amazon AWS account.

1. Access Credentials: Your Access Keys, X.509 Certificates, and Key Pairs. Use access keys to make secure REST or Query protocol requests to any AWS service API. Use X.509 certificates to make secure SOAP protocol requests to AWS service APIs. There are two types of key pairs currently used with specific AWS services — one for Amazon CloudFront and another for Amazon EC2. Use Amazon CloudFront key pairs when creating signed URLs that serve Amazon CloudFront private content. Use Amazon EC2 key pairs to launch and then securely access your Amazon EC2 instances.
2. Sign-In Credentials: Your E-mail Address, Password, and AWS Multi-Factor Authentication Device. To sign in to secure pages on the AWS web site, the AWS Management Console, the AWS Discussion Forums, and the AWS Premium Support site, you need to provide your Amazon e-mail address and password.
3. Account Identifiers: Your AWS Account ID and Canonical User ID

I will talk about creating Access Credentials in Part 2.