Using AWS Console to Create an IAM User and S3 Bucket in Five Minutes

Introduction

Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was reported to be the largest provider of cloud infrastructure. Many companies and organizations are utilizing the AWS platform for many of their cloud services. AWS offers a wide variety of solutions such as the Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 can be used to store files and host static websites while providing 99.9% availability and 99.999999999% (11 9s) of durability. In this example, we will create an IAM user and a S3 bucket. This tutorial assumes you already have an AWS account.

AWS IAM User Creation

It’s common practice to not use your root account in AWS, so we will create an IAM user and assign them S3 rights. To begin, we log in to our AWS account using our root credentials. Once authenticated, navigate to IAM as shown.

All Services -> Security, Identity, & Compliance -> IAM

There should be a list of security recommendations on this page. If multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not enabled on the root account, it is strongly advised that you take the time to do so now. On the right-hand pane note our Account ID. This will be needed to login to the AWS console with our IAM user in the future. As an alternative, feel free to create an account alias to use instead of the Account ID but note the alias is not hidden so a password should not be used.

Under access management on the left-hand pane select users then click add users. Choose a user name and check password. Either enter a custom password or use an autogenerated password. For this tutorial, we created a custom password. Click next to proceed to permissions.

Under set permissions, select attach existing policies directly. For this example, we are creating an S3 administrator account. This user is based on the principle of least privilege which means we should only give users no more than the access that they need. Select the checkbox for the policy named AmazonS3FullAccess and proceed until the new user is created.

Upon success, log out of the root account and login with the created IAM user account. Once logged in, you can validate that you have limited access by selecting the EC2 service. If limited, we should be met with the following pane.

To return to the dashboard, click on the AWS logo in the upper left hand corner. Next, navigate to S3 as shown.

All Services -> Storage -> S3

To begin, click the Create Bucket button. Enter a name for the S3 bucket. It is important to note that the bucket name needs to be a unique name to any other bucket in creation. We can use the default settings for region and public access. Click Create Bucket to complete creation of the S3 bucket.

It’s as simple as that! As shown, our S3 bucket has been successfully created by our new IAM user.