In this post, I will show you how to setup AWS Free Tier Account and AWS IAM. AWS just announced (4/25/2018) that the customers can launch Redshift clusters on its second-generation Dense Compute (DC2) nodes in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region with twice the performance as its DC1 nodes at the same price! Even better, you can have Redshift Free Trial with 750  hours free DC2.Large (160GB of compressed SSD storage) per month for two months if you never tried Redshift in your account regardless free tier account or regular account. Before we can go through Redshift, let’s setup AWS free tier account. So we can practice Redshift with S3 (free tier) and other business intelligence tools.

Sign Up AWS Free Tier Account

When you sign up a new AWS account it is automatically included 12 months of free tier access. Follow the screen instruction to finish the signup. The default AWS support plan is the basic plan with no extra charge.

Setup Identity and Access Management

After you log in to your new account, go to the IAM dashboard. If you want to know more on IAM, please go to Identity&Access Management section in this article AWS Cloud Security. The following five items under IAM must be checked before you can practice other AWS services (e.g. EC2, S3):

• Delete your root access keys. Already checked after you login to your account.
• Activate MFA on your root account: you can download Google Authenticator as the virtual MFA application on your smart phone.
• Create individual IAM users: Add each user that will use this account. Setup user’s permission (or assign it to group with group permission) and security credentials.
• Use groups to assign permissions: Add groups (e.g. admins, DBAs, developers) with permission and assigned users.
• Apply an IAM password policy: Select the password rules to all IAM users.

It looks like this when you finished the setup:

In the above setup, we didn’t setup Roles. You can create a role during the AWS service setup. Please review the detail instructions on my YouTube channel.