Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Terraform, AWS CLI, and Your AWS Environment

Setting Up Your AWS Account If you don’t already have an AWS account, head over to https://aws.amazon.com and sign up. When you first register for AWS, you initially sign in as the root user. This user account has access permissions to do absolutely anything in the account, so from a security perspective, it’s not a good idea to use the root user on a day-to-day basis. You'll need to use the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. To create a new IAM user; Go to the IAM Console. Click Users and then click the Add Users button. Enter a name for the user and make sure “Access key - Programmatic access” is selected. Click the Next button. AWS will ask you to add permissions to the user. By default, new IAM users have no permissions whatsoever and cannot do anything in an AWS account. To give your IAM user the ability to do something, you need to associate one or more IAM Policies with that user’s account. Click Next a couple more times and then the “Create user” button. AWS will sho