This chapter assumes that you have signed up for an AWS account using the free tier. For more details regarding the free tier, navigate to https://aws.amazon.com/free/. One section I want to highlight though is the following:

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Free Tier is designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS Cloud Services. The AWS Free Tier includes services with a free tier available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term.

In order to sign up, you need to provide your credit card information. When the free tier period expires (or if your application exceeds the usage limitations), you will be charged the pay-as-you-go service rates. Regarding S3 specifically, the free tier allows 5GB of storage, 20,000 get requests and 2,000 put requests. First you will need to create an S3 bucket. From the Services selection, locate the Storage group and click on S3.

Create your first bucket. I named mine familyvaultdocs and selected the EU (Frankfurt) region. Click on Next until you have completed the creation of the bucket.

After the bucket is created, you can review the permissions for the bucket. For simplicity's sake I have selected that Everyone has Read and Write permissions for Object access and Permissions access.

Lastly, you will also need to create an access key and secret key for your application. From the Services, look for the Security, Identity & Compliance group and click on IAM (Identity and Access Management). Add a user with the Access type of Programmatic access. This will provide you with the access key ID and secret access key you need.

With your bucket created, user permissions set to Everyone and access keys created, let's write some code.