AWS Overview and MFA Setup

What is cloud?

Back in the old days,organizations and other companies use to host and maintain hardware which includes computing,storage and networking equipment in their own data centre. It asks for a whole separate division to do its maintainance and management which was costly and very uneconomical.

In order to resolve such issues, the concept of the cloud computing emerged. It is an on-demand services for the IT resources with concept of pay-as-you-go pricing. One dont have to manage or own the data centres, everything can be done in the virtualized environment and service over the internet.

Overview of the benefits:

• Pay as you go
• Massive economies of scale.
• Scale the infrastructure as per need.
• Increase speed and agility
• No maintainance cost for the data centre
• Go global in minutes

AWS region selection

Consider four main aspects when deciding the AWS region.

• Latency
• Price
• Service availability
• Data compliance

Interacting with AWS

There are 3 ways that you can interact with AWS:

• AWS Management Console
• AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)
• AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs)

Security and AWS shared Responsibility model

• What is the AWS and Customer Responsible for?

Infrastructure:

Consists - Compute services, Amazon EC2 AWS role - Manages the infrastructure and foundation services. Customer role - Manages Operating system, application platform, encryption,protecting, customer's data.

Container services:

Consists - Amazon RDS AWS Role - Manages infrastructure and foundation services, operating system,and application platform. Customer role - Manages customer data,encryption of that data,protecting it through network firewalls and backups.

Abstracted services:

Consists - Amazon S3 AWS Role - Manages infrastructure layer, Operating systems,platforms,service-side encryption and data protection. Customer role - Manages customer data, protecting it by client side encryption.

Note: From this step forward you will need AWS already set up, the guidelines to create an account would be on AWS Signup Guide

The root user:

This is the admin account who has access/ownership to whole account.

How to ensure the protection of the root user?

• Choose a strong password for user
• Never share it to anyone
• Disable or delete the access keys
• Do not use this account for everyday tasks.

Delete your keys to stay safe.

• Go to the My Security Credentials page in the AWS Management Console and sign in with the root user’s email address and password.
• Open the Access keys section.
• Under Actions, click Delete.
• Click Yes.

IAM ( Identity and Access Management)

What is it?

IAM is the web services that enables you to manage access to your AWS account and resources. It provides authentication and authorization facility. Having IAM services will allow to share the resources without sharing secret key or password.

IAM Features:

• IAM is global
• IAM integrated with majorly all AWS services by default
• IAM supports MFA
• IAM is available for free.

IAM user: A subsitute user that can login in AWS and acts as per privileges.

IAM Group:

IAM group is collection of users. All users in group inherit the permissions assigned to the group. Mass permission is given to users at once.

IAM Policy: The set of rules or permission that are define for a IAM group.