CREATING AN AWS ACCOUNT

1. The first step is to create your AWS account. Account options change all the time, but typically free accounts will not work for this course because they limit access to the services we will need. Most likely the best option is a student account through AWS Educate (https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/) where you should receive at least $100 in free AWS credit.
2. When you register on AWS Educate and your application gets processed (done mostly within 5 minutes with approval email), set up the password.
3. After logging in, you will need to create a starter account under AWS Account. Whenever presented with a choice of region of the world for a service, pick the closest geographic area (e.g., US-East). Make sure you always choose the same region.

           Click on AWS console and you are ready for your AWS journey!

=======================

EXTRA INFORMATION:

1. We will use EMR clusters and some S3 storage for the course, as described in HW1.
2. There is a danger of a runaway job that will consume your entire AWS budget.  It is good to check after one hour if your job has completed yet.
3. In addition, we looked into the possibility of automatic termination of jobs on Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) clusters after one hour.  This would be used when you run the submit the job. By default a cluster terminates by itself once the job is over. But in case it gets stuck or runs over a very long time, it’s recommended to write a lambda function to kill the cluster after certain time.
4. QUESTION:  If anyone (student or TA) discovers a better way to create an automatic kill on a job after one hour, could you let me (Prof. Cooperman) know?  I’ll then post it here.  Thank you.