/aws-account-setup

My baseline setup after creating an AWS account (following AWS Best Practices)

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AWS Account Setup

What happens after creating an AWS account?

Regularly you have two options: a) link the new account to an existing master one or b) start working and configuring resources.

Following AWS Best Practices you shouldn't use your root account for any other action than Billing purposes.

Why?

A root account handles everything in your AWS, even if you assign an AdministratorAccess role to a user. That's why you should protect it by enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) and removing their assigned access and secret keys.

So here's a baseline setup that you can use for getting started in the AWS Console as soon as you created or linked to a Master Account in your organization.

What's included?

A terraform template that performs the following actions:

- set a password policy
- create an IAM group with AdministratorAccess permissions
- create a new user called "cli"
- create an access and secret key using keybase :)
- create a private bucket to store the keys generated to the user
- create a bucket policy to allow access to the credentials only to the managed account
- place an object with the contents of the access and secret key, in json format for better reading

How does it work?

  1. Use keybase and generate a pgp key (really, you should do it to simplify your life)
  2. Make sure to have terraform installed
  3. If you're using a root account, create a TEMPORARILY access and secret key to your root account to perform these actions, don't forget to place your credentials in your local ~/.aws/credentials file. (This is not the recommended way, please remember to remove the root keys created after installing the resources of this template).
  4. If you're using a linked account managed by a master account, accessing a member account by linked roles is definitely the best way to manage new AWS accounts. Just make sure to add a record in your ~/.aws/config file that uses OrganizationAccountAccessRole role.
[profile my_new_account]
output = json
region = us-east-1
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::{my_master_account_id}:role/OrganizationAccountAccessRole
source_profile = {my_root_account_profile}

Then, run the command by providing some required parameters: keybase_username: The keybase username to use their pgp key and encrypt our aws_secret_access_key organization: Display name of your organization, just for tagging purposes profile: The profile name from your ~/.aws/credentials or ~/.aws/config that you plan to use to install these resources region: A valid region name where the resources will be installed

Ok resources created now what?

  • Retrieve the credentials from the bucket
aws --profile YourProfile s3 cp s3://YourProfile-credentials/credentials.json - --sse AES256
  • Wait, my secret key seems to be encrypted, how can I store use it?
aws --profile YourProfile s3 cp s3://YourProfile-credentials/credentials.json - --sse AES256 | jq -r '.aws_secret_access_key' | base64 --decode | keybase pgp decrypt

  • All set, please delete any access and secret key generated to your root account if created.

  • How can I create new records on my ~/.aws/credentials file?

# Download your credentials file into /tmp
aws --profile MyProfile s3 cp s3://MyProfile-credentials/credentials.json /tmp/credentials.json --sse AES256
jq -r '. | .profile,.aws_access_key_id' /tmp/credentials.json | xargs printf 'aws --profile %s configure set aws_access_key_id  %s' $1 $2 | awk '{ system($0) }'
rm /tmp/credentials.json

Are there better alternatives?

Of course, please take a look at the AWS Landing Zone solution.