Create an Amazon Web Services account

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform with a bunch of services. The most popular of these services are Amazon EC2 (provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud), Amazon EBS (provides block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances) and Amazon S3 (provides service for storing and retrieving data, at any time, from anywhere on the web).

The realy great thing that new AWS customers are able to try all these services for free - AWS introducing a free usage tier.

The AWS sign-up process is pretty straightforward and fully automated. The process may take from several minutes to half an hour (Amazon may verify your identity by the phone call), but you have to do it once.

The following steps illustrate how you can easily setup AWS account:

1. Open Amazon Web Services site and select "Create an AWS Account" at the top right corner of the page.

2. Fill in the form with your email adress and select "I am a new user" option.

3. In the login credentials form type your name, email adress and password once more time and click Continue button.

4. Fill in the contact information form and click Create Account and Continue.

5. Fill in the payment form with information from your credit card.

6. Fill in the identity verification form. You will received automation message on your phone and you have to type in a PIN displayed in the web browser.

7. Additionaly Amazon support may call you to verify your credit card number, billing adress and personal information.

8. Confirmation message sent on your mail box will be final step of a registration process.

Now you can navigate to the manage account section and verify status of services.

Using menu from the top right corner you can navigate to the AWS Management Console or check account status.

AWS Management Console provides you graphic interface for configuring and managing services.

In the next post we are going to speak about how to create Amzon EC2 Linux instance.