Chapter 1: Building Your AWS Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a growing cloud technology provider that many companies use to help house their data. Originating from Seattle, Washington in late 2006, AWS is steadily becoming the most prominent service provider. Due to its usability and its user-friendly interfaces, AWS is used by over 800,000 companies and makes up 65% or more of the cloud infrastructure space. Some of its better-known services, such as S3, Lambda, and EC2 will be frequently talked about through this book and are services that are commonly used in the real world.

This chapter is going to go over the basics of AWS and will walk through setting up an AWS account. It's important that we learn the basics of getting our AWS account configured and ready so that there isn't any additional housekeeping needed after setting up an account. After setting up an account, we'll walk through and set up a few EC2 instances with various flavors of operating systems, and look at vulnerable services within those operating systems. It's encouraged that, after completing the chapter, you look at building out more EC2 instances with other operating systems for your environment.

In this chapter, we'll explore AWS through the following topics:

• Exploring Amazon Web Services
• Understanding the testing environment
• Configuring the environment
• Exploring vulnerable services
• Attacking vulnerabilities
• The AWS Command Line Interface