Setting up Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Getting cloud resources on-demand from Amazon is now as simple as setting up an account and attaching a credit card.

Sign up online

Sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and create an IAM user by following instructions from Amazon’s Setup Documentation. From the documentation you would only need to do the following two steps:

  1. Sign up for AWS

  2. Create and IAM User

Note To create access keys, you must have permissions to perform the required IAM actions. For more information, see Managing Credentials using IAM.

If you already have an account, here’s the steps to get you IAM access keys:

  1. Go to the IAM console.

  2. From the navigation menu, click Users.

  3. Select your IAM user name, or create a new one.

  4. Click User Actions, and then click Manage Access Keys.

  5. Click Create Access Key.

    Note Your keys will look something like this:
    Access key ID example : AKIAIOSFODNN7*EXAMPLE*
    Secret access key example: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCY*EXAMPLEKEY*

  6. Click Download Credentials, and store the keys (a .csv file) in a secure location.

Note Your secret key present in the credentials file will no longer be available through the AWS Management Console; you will have the only copy. Keep it confidential in order to protect your account.

Setting up local-dependencies

Swift requires python and apache-libcloud to talk to the Amazon EC2. To install these packages follow these steps:

Install python and libcloud library on a debian based linux distributions such as Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get instal python python-libcloud

If you machine has python and pip installed, you can install libcloud with pip:

# With super-user privileges do following
pip install apache-libcloud

For OSX, do the following:

port install py-libcloud