I recently found a month-long course aimed at those who aspire to get Linux-related jobs in the industry. I work with Windows and Azure in my professional life but have been wanting to learn more about Linux system administration and DevOps practices. The course is ran every month through it’s subreddit, but I am going to be working through the course on my own schedule.
To get ready for the course, I needed my own server. The course offers guides on how to set up a server on the popular cloud hosting providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Digital Ocean. Since I already have Azure experience from my professional life, I decided to go with AWS to learn something new.
Before setting up a server, I needed to sign up for an AWS account.
Now that I had registered my new AWS account, I could sign in to AWS with the root user of the new account I had just created.
Since I was not already familiar with AWS, I opted to switch to the new Console Home.
Once signed in as the root user, I needed to take steps to secure my new AWS accounts such as enable MFA and create a separate IAM user.
With the root user configured for MFA, it was time to create a separate administrator IAM user. It is considered a security best practice to not use your root account for day-to-day use, but instead create separate users for specific roles and functions.
After creating the user group and user, I created an account alias so that the sign-in URL for the IAM user is easier to remember.
With the new IAM user and account alias created, I signed out of the root user and signed back in as the new IAM user.
Now that I had secured my AWS account set up a separate IAM user from the root user, I was finally ready to create a server! Creating a server is included in the Day 0 course work, but this post is already getting pretty long, so I’ll be covering that in a Part 2 post.
What is your preferred cloud hosting provider? Are there other Linux administration courses you would recommend? Let me know by responding to this post, or you can email me at cypherbean@protonmail.com.
