Create your AWS account

CDK synthesizes CloudFormation, but synthesizing isn't deploying. To actually run any of the stacks you write in this project, you need a real AWS account behind it — this lesson gets you one.

Sign up

Visit aws.amazon.com/resources/create-account and click Create an AWS Account. You'll provide:

• An email address and password for the account.
• An AWS account name — anything memorable works, this isn't customer-facing.
• Contact information — full name, phone number, country, and address.
• A support plan — Basic is free and enough for everything in this project.
• A payment method. AWS requires a card on file even for free-tier usage, but nothing in this project goes anywhere near a billable threshold.

AWS verifies your email with a code, and your phone with a text or call. Agree to the customer agreement, and the account is live.

Sign in

Sign in with the email and password you just set — these are your root user credentials, and they can do anything in the account: billing, deleting resources, changing who else has access, all of it.

Heads up: root credentials are for account-level tasks only — closing the account, changing billing, that kind of thing. A couple of lessons from now you'll create a separate IAM user for CDK to actually use day to day, so root stays locked away.

That's the whole setup. Everything from here — installing tools, creating an IAM user, deploying your first stack — happens inside this one account.