AWS CLI and Python SDK

We can also manage the AWS services via the command-line interface. The AWS CLI is a Python package that can be installed via PIP (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html). Let's install it on our Ubuntu host: 

$ sudo pip3 install awscli
$ aws --version
aws-cli/1.15.59 Python/3.5.2 Linux/4.15.0-30-generic botocore/1.10.58

Once the AWS CLI is installed, for easier and more secure access, we will create a user and configure AWS CLI with the user credentials. Let's go back to the AWS console and select IAM for user and access management: 

We can choose Users on the left panel to create a user: 

Select programmatic access and assign the user to the default administrator group:

The last step will show an Access key ID and a Secret access key. Copy them into a text file and keep it in a safe place: 

We will complete the AWS CLI authentication credential setup via aws configure in the terminal. We will go over AWS regions in the upcoming section; we will use us-east-1 for now, but feel free to come back and change this value later: 

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: <key>
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: <secret>
Default region name [None]: us-east-1
Default output format [None]: json

We will also install the AWS Python SDK, Boto3 (https://boto3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/): 

$ sudo pip install boto3
$ sudo pip3 install boto3

# verification
$ python3
Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 23 2017, 16:37:01)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import boto3
>>> exit()

We are now ready to move on to the subsequent sections, starting with an introduction to AWS cloud networking services.