Preparing our cloud environment for deployment

As we discussed in Chapter 4, Deploying to Microsoft Azure, we will be running Ansible and Terraform on our local machine, which means we can install and configure the AWS command-line interface (CLI).

Ansible and Terraform will use the credentials configured in the AWS CLI to authenticate against the AWS APIs. For details on how to install the AWS CLI, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html.

Once installed, you need to generate and enter your credentials. This process is documented at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-quickstart.html.

Once configured, you should be able to run the following commands:

$ aws --version
$ aws ec2 describe-regions

When I run them on my own machine, I get the following output:

Figure 5.1 – The output of running the AWS version command to check the version

For the second command, there...