Creating AWS Account

Estimated read: 7 min

If you already run production workloads on AWS, you can skip straight to the next lecture on IAM users – use an existing account, not a brand-new one, so this doesn’t collide with your organization’s account structure. This lecture is for a genuinely new AWS account, created purely for working through this guide.

Signing up

Go to the AWS sign-up flow and provide an email address and account name. This becomes your root user – the single most privileged identity on the account, and one you should almost never use for day-to-day work after this setup is done.
Enter payment information. AWS requires a card even for free-tier usage, to verify identity and cover any usage beyond free-tier limits.
Verify your identity via phone (SMS or voice call, your choice).
Choose a support plan. The free Basic plan is enough for everything in this guide – don’t be upsold into a paid plan you don’t need yet.

The account you get

A brand-new AWS account starts empty: no IAM users beyond root, no resources, no existing billing history. That’s deliberate – it means you’re not inheriting anyone else’s configuration or security posture. If this is a personal account you’re using purely to work through this guide, this is the right starting point.

Root user hygiene, immediately

Before you do anything else in this new account:

Enable MFA (multi-factor authentication) on the root user. The root user can do literally anything in the account, including deleting it – protecting it is the single highest-leverage security step available to you.
Do not create access keys for the root user. You won’t need programmatic root access for anything in this guide, and long-lived root credentials are one of the most common causes of serious AWS account compromise.
Plan to create a dedicated IAM user for actual administration – covered in the next lecture – and stop using root entirely once that user exists.

Coming from a legacy on-prem or single-warehouse world

If your prior experience is entirely on-prem or inside a single managed warehouse account, the concept worth internalizing here is that an AWS account is a hard security and billing boundary, roughly analogous to a completely separate database instance with its own administrator, not a schema or a role inside a shared instance. Everything you do in the rest of this section – IAM users, cost budgets, the Databricks Marketplace subscription – lives inside this one boundary.

Once your account exists and root is secured, move on to Creating AWS IAM User Account.

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