Logging In and Navigating the AWS website - Green-Biome-Institute/AWS GitHub Wiki

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Logging In and Navigating the AWS website

Go to https://aws.amazon.com/. In the upper right hand corner there is a large orange button labelled “Sign In to the Console.” Sign in with your user credentials. When you log into AWS you will enter the AWS Management Console.

If you’d like to get a better perspective on all the services offered by AWS (the “blocks” described in the Introduction to AWS), click on the dropdown arrow next to “All services.”

For our purposes, most of the services we will use will most likely be under the “Recently visited services” list. If the service you would like to use is not underneath the recently visited page or you need to look for something else, just click the search bar at the top of the screen and type what you would like to access. For example, typing "EC2" will give a search result with an orange box labelled EC2 with the description “Virtual servers in the cloud.” Clicking on this will take you to the EC2 Dashboard.

The EC2 Dashboard manages all of your instances. If you click on “Instances (Running)” it will take you to all of the instances being run on the GBI AWS account!. Clicking again anywhere except the blue Instance ID link will highlight a given instance and open up more information about that instance at the bottom of the page. If you are ever having issues with an instance, this is where you can look to troubleshoot by seeing what kind of IAM role the instance has, the type/amount of memory and compute power, etc. More information about EC2 instances.

Typing "S3" in the search bar (or clicking from the AWS Management Console) will take you to the S3 Dashboard, which lets you see all the buckets in the GBI AWS account. More information about S3 buckets.

If you see any red X’s, it is most likely the result of a lack of IAM permissions.


AWS Regions


All of the AWS services are hosted on physical equipment in a datacenter. The time for data to upload/download from the cloud relies on the distance from where the data is now (your computer) and where you want it to be or be processed (the data center). One of the big draws to Amazon as a cloud service provider is the fact that they are so large, they have physical data centers all over the world.

The relevancy of this to us is that certain services, like EC2, are hosted in specific regions (relating to the data centers in those areas). Also certain data centers are smaller/larger or have different capacities, and therefore prices can vary between them. Likewise, if you are “in” the wrong region (on your internet browser), you won’t be able to see the services you are using that are in a different one (i.e. if you are in us-east-2 and have processes running in us-west-2, they won’t be visible to you). We will be using US West 2 (Oregon): us-west-2.

This is extremely easy to change, just click on the region on the top right and select a different one. I only stress this because it’s an easy thing to forget and you don’t want to start creating processes in a bunch of different regions for fear of forgetting them and then being charged for them.


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