Signing up with AWS and configuring the AWS CLI

To use AWS services you must, of course, have an AWS account. The AWS account is how we authenticate ourselves to AWS and is how AWS charges us for services.

AWS has two kinds of accounts that we can use, as follows:

• The root account is what's created when we sign up for an AWS account. The root account has full access to AWS services.
• An IAM user account is a less privileged account you can create within your root account. The owner of a root account creates IAM accounts, assigning the scope of permissions to each IAM account.

It is bad form to use the root account directly since the root account has complete access to AWS resources. If the account credentials for your root account were to be leaked...