Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) : Part 2: Create Access Credentials

You have created an Amazon AWS account (See part 1 for account creation instruction), now let's create access credentials.
Log into your Amazon AWS account, click the Security Credentials On the left Panel. Amazon automatically creates one access key for you when you sign up for an account.

Access Keys screenshot

Let's create X.509 certificates. Go to the X.509 certificates tab and click the link – ‘Create a new certificate’. A private key and an X.509 certificate will be generated for you. Remember to download at least your private key before you close the page. You can rename the file name of download keys to something easy to remember.

Now you have created the X.509 certificates. The final piece you need is Amazon EC2 Key Pairs for launching an Amazon EC2 instance. Click the Key Pairs tab, then the Create a New Key Pair link. Save the private key(rename it if you want). Also download the public key.

Let review what you have so far:

• AWS account ID
• Access key ID


• Secret Access KEY
• X.509 certificate file (.pem file)
• X.509 private key file (.pem file you saved to your computer)
• CloudFront public key file (.pem file)
• CloudFront private key file (.pem file)

Congratulations, you have completed the setup of your Amazon AWS! In Part 3 I will talk about how to launch an instance and access it from your computer.