Creating your AWS Management account ¶

Create the first AWS account ¶

First and foremost you'll need to create an AWS account for your project.

Attention

Note this will be your management account and has to be called <project-name>-management.

E.g. if your project is called binbash then your account should be binbash-management.

This will be the management account for your AWS Organization and the email address you use for signing up will be the root user of this account -- you can see this user represented in the architecture diagram.

Since the root user is the main access point to your account it is strongly recommended that you keep its credentials (email, password) safe by following AWS best practices.

Tip

To protect your management account, enabling Multi Factor Authentication is highly encouraged. Also, reviewing the account's billing setup is always a good idea before proceeding.

For more details on setting up your AWS account: Organization account setup guide

Create a bootstrap user with temporary administrator permissions ¶

Leverage needs a user with temporary administrator permissions in order to deploy the initial resources that will form the foundations you will then use to keep building on. That initial deployment is called the bootstrap process and thus the user required for that is called "the bootstrap user".

To create that user, navigate to the IAM page and create a user named mgmt-org-admin following steps 2 and 3 of this leverage doc.

Info

Bear in mind that the page for creating users may change from time to time but the key settings for configuring the bootstrap user are the following:

It must be an IAM user (we won't be using IAM Identity Center for this)
Password can be auto-generated
It requires admin privileges which you can achieve by directly attaching the AdministratorAccess policy to it
There's no need to add the user to any group as it is only a temporary user

Usually the last step of the user creation should present you the following information:

Console sign-in URL
User name
Console password

Make a note of all of these and keep them in a safe place as you will need them in the following steps.

Info

If you are only getting the bootstrap user credentials for someone else in your team or in Binbash's team, then please share that using a secure way (e.g. password management service, GPG keys, etc).

Info

If user was set up with the option "Force to change password on first login", you should log into the console to do so.

Next steps ¶

You have successfully created and configured the AWS account for your Leverage project. From now on, almost all interactions with the AWS environment (with few notable exceptions) will be performed via Leverage.

Next, you will setup all required dependencies to work on a Leverage project in your local machine.