Difficulties getting started with AWS

Summary

A short overview of some of the many issues I encountered when trying to get myself up and running with AWS.

AWS Doesn't Like Itself?

After creating an AWS root user account, I followed their introductory instructions to create a new AWS organisation and an Administrator user inside said organisation, in accordance with best practices (i.e. don't use your root user account for anything but administration of the overall organisation).

Unfortunately, when I tried to log in using said organisation account, all I ever got was a rejection from AWS telling me that my credentials weren't valid. So, I logged back into the root user account, and used their password reset flow to send a new password reset email to the org user. I then used the link in said email to reset the password, and tried logging in again, only to be met with the exact same result.

The only thing I can think is that the instructions AWS provided are, in some way, flawed. Or that I didn't follow them correctly, which would suggest that the instructions aren't as robust against user errors as they should be. Plus, I'm pretty sure I followed them exactly as written. As of the time of writing this, I still haven't resolved the issue, but I'm beginning to think that I will need to blow that org away and start all over again, which is a pain in the rear end.

Redoing the tutorial and duplicating everything seemed to work. Fingers crossed that it stays working...

The Next Stage Isn't Better

The next step discusses setting up the AWS CLI. After telling you to install the CLI locally, it goes straight into configuration of credentials. Which makes sense, except it dives straight into telling you what information you need, but doesn't explain anything about how to get your hands on it:

To configure the credentials, use the command aws configure and include the credentials of the user created in the previous module of this tutorial. Add the user we included in the user group with administrator-level permissions.

When you use the aws configure command, you will be asked for:

• AWS Access Key ID
• AWS Secret Access Key
• Default Region: Provide the Region in the following format us-east-1. For a list of Region names and codes, see this table.
• Default Output Format: This is how the output should be displayed by default, and includes, but is not limited to: json, yaml, text. Review the documentation for all options.

Precisely nothing about where to find the relevant credentials. Moreover, when I eventually discovered after searching through the AWS documentation that you can apparently find CLI credentials on the first page you see when you log in, I couldn't figure out how to get back to that page. Eventually, I logged out and back in (which seemed like it almost wasn't going to work, yet again...). That showed me a screen which said I could look up credentials for command line access, but it appeared that the only credentials I could access there were the ones for the root user account. Given that this is new-user-onboarding documentation that AWS themselves point you to, it's rather rubbish, quite frankly.¹ I still haven't figured out how to get CLI creds for the org user yet.

It is possible that I am completely misunderstanding something about how AWS works here, but if so it is completely unclear to me at this point. Which suggests that their documentation for beginners to AWS is seriously lacking.

AWS SSO

After eventually giving up and just using what appeared to be the creds for the admin account's CLI access, I then tried to follow the other instructions they linked to about using aws configure sso. That didn't go any better, quite frankly. While it does appear that the relevant config files have been set in my .aws folder, they just don't seem to work very well in many circumstances. E.g. I tried to use aws sso login, and just got pointed to a login webpage that kept on looping through the login process, without ever updating the CLI tool. Seriously, I went through entering my login credentials something like six times in a row, where each time after I finished it would just take me back to the start, while the CLI tool waited for a response from the API. I just gave up in the end.

Fortunately, it seemed like I could copy-paste stuff out of the web portal with the admin creds directly into the configuration file, and that seemed to work—though I also had to copy in a 'session token' field, of which no mention is made in the walkthrough. It was an absolute nightmare just to get myself set up on the basics, however, especially when I FOLLOWED THE DARN AWS BEGINNER GUIDE AND IT DIDN'T FREAKING WORK.

All in all, a very poor first impression for getting myself set up independently on AWS. Honestly, if it weren't the 800-pound gorilla² of cloud services, that would have been enough to make me run in the other direction and not look back.

Dishonourable Mentions

I came across other stuff in under the getting started sections that was seemingly, at best, badly outdated. For example:

• Deploy a LAMP Web App on Amazon Lightsail,
  which seemingly assumed that you were using Bash on a Linux machine. As someone on Windows using Powershell and not greatly familiar with LAMP applications, this so-called guide was rather unhelpful. Fortunately, I could use WSL to cover this, which I guess perhaps AWS assumes people on Windows are already operating in. Plus, the Lightsail blueprint and bundle IDs specified in the guide were so out-of-date as to be unavailable anymore. Fortunately, in this instance there seemed to be pretty obvious modern versions of these. Lastly, the big blob shell script that they tell you to copy and paste doesn't seem to work anymore. As at the moment of writing, I'm unsure how I can observe what's happening on the Lightsail server to find out what went wrong. I presume that it's some sort of drift between versions of the LAMP Lightsail blueprint or the sample application that the tutorial tells you to clone. I don't know nearly enough about LAMP-stack applications to make a guess at what the issue might be.³,⁴

• On the Cloud Essentials page, one of the sample topics under 'Launch your first app' says "Getting Started with .NET Development on AWS with Visual Studio 2019". VS 2022 has already been out for well over a year at this point, and the latest (greatest?) versions of .NET are only supported in it. True, you probably can use 2019 for their purposes fine, but this really looks like something they need to revisit. I can understand some documentation getting a bit stale, but not stuff linked to on their introductory 'Cloud Essentials' page.

• A newer Lightsail tutorial failed on the first section with problems to do with building a Docker image. In their defence, this problem seems to be something arising from changes in Debian around installing Python packages. They apparently are trying to introduce PEP 668. It's a worthy goal on Debian's part, but unfortunately it does introduce a whole bunch of pain in the neck when I just want to follow a tutorial. Trying a user installation by appending the --user flag didn't help. I tried the suggested --break-system-packages flag to pass to pip on the failing RUN command in the Dockerfile, but even that didn't work fully—it failed on a subsequent step. In the end, using --break-system-packages and specifying --python python3 to pipenv seemed to do the trick. Fortunately, it was largely much smoother sailing after that. At least, until stage 4, when they completely missed out the part where you need to use the updated container image that was just pushed to Lightsail to do a second deployment. It was trivial to change the previous instruction appropriately, but they didn't even say to do it.⁵

But You Claim You Did That Training?

I should clarify, in case anyone starts wondering: The training for the first AWS certification, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, that I undertook via A Cloud Guru covered all the foundational high-level concepts that you will be tested on in the certification exam. It didn't however, walk me through getting started with an AWS account. Rather, the exercises included used dummy accounts set up under their own AWS organisation, with login creds provided by them. Which worked very well for the purposes of the training, to be honest. Besides, given that AWS apparently can't keep its introductory material up to date, what hope does an outside organisation have?

Conclusion

I found that many of the AWS introductory training materials and documentation were, at best, badly outdated. In some instances, they rather seemed to assume that someone was already an AWS expert. It was not a very good impression at all. One positive thing I will say about the tutorials I saw, however, was that they pretty much all ended with cleaning up whatever resources that were stood up during the tutorial. I imagine that they probably do it so they don't need to deal with a legion of practice instances doing nothing for nobody, but it does help prevent people suddenly getting billed for something they have forgotten about down the line.

1. And I had always heard that AWS was supposed to be the cloud provider with excellent customer service, to boot. ↩

2. To misuse Dr Joe Armstrong's famous quote, it definitely feels like I'm forced to deal with the whole forest if I want to use this gorilla's banana... ↩

3. It appears that quite possibly that tutorial has been superseded by this one (which also seems to be a much better tutorial), but the older tutorial was the one that I was pointed to out of the gate when I had just signed up to AWS. ↩

4. I eventually stumbled across yet another tutorial, which seems to be a point-and-click equivalent to this first tutorial. Honestly, it seems like it's probably a much better resource given that the whole thing is just about deploying a pre-formed LAMP-stack instance to Lightsail. ↩

5. Actually, they did eventually get to that, but not after telling you to note that the container was being deployed, meaning I had to infer I was already supposed to have done that. It looks like a copy-paste error. Does nobody proofread these things? ↩