Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads

A very well put up Blog on Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads by Eric Hammond. Some useful extract from the Blog.

When you need an AWS command line toolset not provided by Ubuntu packages, you can download the tools directly from Amazon and install them locally.Unfortunately, Amazon does not have one single place where you can download all the command line tools for the various services, nor are all of the tools installed in the same way, nor do they all use the same format for accessing the AWS credentials.

The following steps show how to install and configure the AWS command line tools provided by Amazon [...]

Prerequisites

Install required software packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-6-jre ruby1.8-full libxml2-utils unzip cpanminus build-essential

Create a directory where all AWS tools will be installed:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/aws

Now we’re ready to start downloading and installing all of the individual software bundles that Amazon has released and made available in scattered places on their web site and various S3 buckets.

Download and Install AWS Command Line Tools

These steps should be done from an empty temporary directory so you can afterwards clean up all of the downloaded and unpacked files.

Note: Some of these download URLs always get the latest version and some tools have different URLs every time a new version is released. Click through on the tool link to find the latest [Download] URL.

EC2 API command line tools:

wget --quiet http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
unzip -qq ec2-api-tools.zip
sudo rsync -a --no-o --no-g ec2-api-tools-*/ /usr/local/aws/ec2/

EC2 AMI command line tools:

wget --quiet http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip
unzip -qq ec2-ami-tools.zip
sudo rsync -a --no-o --no-g ec2-ami-tools-*/ /usr/local/aws/ec2/

Sign in to and Use the AWS Account

In this guide, lets understand below topics:

• Understand AWS Manament Console
• Different ways of logging into the AWS Management Console.
• Sign into the AWS Management Console using the Account level credentials
• Configure AWS Management Console as per your suitability.

AWS Management Console simple definition by AWS :

Access and manage Amazon’s growing suite of infrastructure web services through a simple and intuitive, web-based user interface. The AWS Management Console provides convenient management of your compute, storage, and other cloud resources.

AWS constantly keeps pushing new features and support for various services in the console. If any feature is not available throught the AWS Management Console, the user must employ the APIs and/or SDKs provided by AWS.

In AWS, there are basically two different ways for a user to sign in to the AWS Management Console for handling the services:

• Using the Account level credentials

Consider this as a "POWER USER LOGIN" (this is a term coined by me to set perspective and not by AWS)

A user can sign in using the typical AWS Console login URL. The user must use email-address using which the account is created and password provided.

This way of sign in allows the user complete control over the AWS services, resources and  account management.

In this guide we will be concentrating more on Account-level login to the AWS Management Console.  

• Amazon Indentity and Access Management (IAM) User

Consider this as a "ACCESS CONTROLLED USERs"(this is a term coined by me to set perspective and not by AWS)

In case there is need of more than 1 user to login to the AWS account, you can use the IAM Service. Each user may have same or different access controls over the various AWS services and resources. The users can sign into the console using a different alias, specific to your account and using specific user login name & password. These privilieges are not only applicable to the AWS Management Console. The same can be applied to the use of SDKs and APIs. This can be achieved by creating user specific Access Keys and Secret Keys.

IAM also enables identity federation between your corporate directory and AWS services.

I'm NOT covering IAM user login in this tutorial, but I will surely write a guide on the topic and provide updated links.

Sign into the AWS Management Console using the Account level credentials :

Cancel an AWS Account

AWS allows users to cancel their AWS account.

If you wish to cancel your AWS account follow the below steps:

• Login to your AWS Account as a returning user by selecting the option : "I am a returning user and password is:" , click on Sign in using our secure server button.

Create an AWS Account - Free Usage Tier

Amazon Web Services helps its new customers to get started into the cloud by introducing a free usage tier. This tier is available to customers for 12 months. 

Below are the highlights of AWS’s free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except SWF, DynamoDB, SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely):

NOTE:

Below Image is updated as of October 1st,2012 for AWS RDS announcement. For latest updates, please check AWS Free Tier for more details

 

 

Do check AWS Free Tier for more details.

How to get started: