Security credentials are critical for web services such as EC2 and S3. They are used for remote access of the cloud servers on AWS. For example, in this chapter, we will use these credentials to log in to the servers remotely from a client machine.
AWS provides a web interface to manage security credentials. This recipe will guide you through the steps to create, download, and manage these security credentials.
Before getting started, we assume that you have successfully registered with AWS; otherwise, you need to follow the steps in the previous recipe to register with AWS.
We also assume that we have a client machine with Linux (such as CentOS) installed. The machine should be able to access the Internet and has at least one GUI web browser installed.
Create a directory for storing AWS credentials using the following command:
mkdir -v ~/.ec2