First, sign up for an account.

Add a way to pay. Your costs will vary (if you accidentally add five thousand large server instances for example).

Remember, everything past this point could potentially cost you money. On my first day using it, I was charged about $1.30. Not much of an investment on the front end.

Now, click on “Access Identifiers”

Remember this location. The Access Key ID and your Secret Access Key will be used to identify your account from this point on.

Just below these keys, you will have to create an X.509 certificate. Click “create new” to begin.

Now, download these newly generated private key files to location that you will remember. You need will need both files.

You are now set up with all the Amazon access keys you’ll need. This means we can sign up for the Elastic Compute Cloud. Click on “Products” and “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud”. Then click “Sign Up”

To verify that it worked, click on “Your Account” then “Account Activity”. You should see two items listed with a cost of zero.

We are ready to create a virtual computer.