AWS for Beginners Part 1

I am hoping to get back into doing some AWS stuff over the next couple of months.  I am a huge fan of some of the tools and technology they have built.  It’s not perfect and its often not well understood by people lifting and shifting existing infrastructure into “the cloud”

My view is firmly if this is what you have done, then you have done it wrong and missed the point….

But if you do want to kick the tyres and see what it’s all about go and setup an account and play 

Ensure you implement these three recommendations

• Root Account Security – Ensure you have a strong password on this account then stop using it.  Use IAM to set up another account and then use that.
• Enable Two Factor Authentication – This is a must,  Sadly AWS don’t appear to support my preferred 2FA device . Yubikey so i’m using the Google authenticator
• Enable Billing Alerts Create an alert so that if your bill will be over X you will get a notification.  Its very easy to leave an Instance or several running somewhere.  No one wants billshock.

Update:   AWS now does support Yubikey.   Wahoo.