Week 9: Setup AWS IAM and EC2 for Beginners

AWS, GCP, and Azure are the three dominant cloud providers in the industry. As a Security Engineer you will encounter at least one of them in virtually every role — whether you are securing infrastructure, reviewing architecture, responding to incidents, or building detection rules. You do not need to master all three. But you do need to go deep on at least one. This post is about AWS — the most widely deployed of the three and the one most commonly required in Security Engineering job postings. Learning AWS deeply means understanding not just how to launch a virtual machine, but how identity works, how access is controlled, how services communicate securely, and how to build infrastructure that is defensible by design. This post is written for a complete beginner to AWS . By the end you will know how to do the following entirely from your local computer using the CLI — no browser required after initial setup: Login to AWS securely using either static credentials or a hardware security