For Unix developers, the following prerequisites must be available for setting up the development environment:

• Any Linux distribution 
• Python 2.7 or above installed
• An AWS account (access key and secret access key)
• An internet connection

AWS provides Python packages for accessing various services. For example, a Python package called boto3 is provided by AWS for accessing all AWS services. 

Execute the following steps to set up your development environment on a Unix system:

1. Install Python 2.7 or above
2. Install Python package manager (pip)
3. Using pip, install the Python packages boto3 and awscli:

pip install boto3
pip install awscli

4. Configure the AWS account by invoking the aws configure command and provide your AWS access key and secret access key. Also specify the region:

[root@packt-pub]# aws configure
AWS Access Key ID []: AJDUPOET79345LJNMSKL
AWS Secret Access Key []: KSHDF908lkjLKLLDFGlkjld9435NKLJLDlkslLKJ
Default region name [us-east-1]: us-east-1
Default output format [None]:

You are now ready to use your Unix environment to build AWS applications. Let's get some hands-on experience of developing AWS applications.