Setting up the library to interact with your AWS account
When logging into the AWS web console, you are probably used to using a username/password combination to authenticate either for an organization's root user account, or for an IAM user that has been set up with a separate set of credentials and scoped access. When dealing with AWS programmatically using the boto3 SDK, we will use two different credentials, an Access Key ID and a Secret Key, to authenticate against the API. In this recipe, we are going to configure our key pair in the web console, which we'll then use for the remainder of this chapter to authenticate our requests. While there are multiple ways to pass this credential information to boto3, we are going to configure it in a central configuration file for convenient reuse.
Getting ready
You'll need an AWS account, either for a root user or for an IAM account that has been created with the necessary access scopes for you.