Amazon web services are a really powerful ecosystem of storage and compute infrastructure and are new to me coming from the academic world where I had access to the university’s compute cluster. I’ve only used AWS a little bit to host some files but haven’t done much.

As part of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, I was an “identity access management” (IAM) user as part of the CZ Biohub organization and I found that figuring out how to set up my access keys was not straightforward, so here are my screenshots of figuring it out.

Step 0

Log in to the AWS Console.

Step 1

After you log in to the console, click your name and then “My Security Credentials”

Step 2

Click “Dashboard”

Step 3

Click “Rotate your access keys”

Step 4

In the exposed menu, click “Manage User Access Keys”

Step 5

Click “Security Credentials”

Step 6

Click “Create access key”

That will prompt you to download accessKeys.csv.

Step 7: Install AWS CLI

Install the AWS command line interface

$ pip install awscli

Step 8: Configure AWS CLI to use your access keys

I saved accessKeys.csv to my home directory and then cat’d it so I could have it ready to copy/paste and answer the questions asked by aws configure:

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [****************N4FQ]: 
AWS Secret Access Key [****************mAog]: 
Default region name [us-east-2]: 
Default output format [None]: 

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