Cloud services and offerings are becoming more ubiquitous. Enterprises will likely move among the available cloud offerings, which is a good thing. It could be pricing, manageability or service availability and reliability. Compliance is just one of many reasons. Some companies make it easier to migrate than others.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of those companies. It offers a simplified option for Visual Studio developers that want to move deployments onto its cloud platform.
The AWS Toolkit For Visual Studio is a simple, elegant solution that highlights the beauty of AWS’ solution. This article will show you how to deploy the tool and attach Visual Studio to your AWS Subscription.
Requirements
Although there are some prerequisites to connecting Visual Studio to AWS these are easy to meet for most developers.
The first two requirements are, of course, an AWS account and a copy Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 or higher is supported by the AWS Toolkit. This second requirement has one caveat. Visual Studio Express is supported but its capabilities are very limited. Visual Studio Express doesn’t allow third-party extensions. Visual Studio Express users will not be able use third-party extensions.
Last but not least, Visual Studio must be installed on an operating system that supports it. AWS supports Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Windows 10 is not mentioned in the AWS documentation. Despite this, Windows 10 was used to write this article (alongside Visual Studio 2015), and everything seems to work.
Visual Studio: Installing the AWS Toolkit
AWS makes the AWS Toolkit For Visual Studio available for downloading here. The installation process involves following a fairly standard Windows Setup wizard. To close the Welcome screen, click Next once the wizard has begun. The screen will prompt you to agree to the terms of the license agreement. Click Next to return to Figure 1. This screen will ask you which components you want to install. Unless you have compelling reasons to choose another subset of features, you should stick with the default selections. To install the AWS Toolkit, click Next. Once the installation is complete, click Finish.
Figure 1: The AWS Tools For Windows Setup wizard asks you which components you want to install. Create an IAM account
Visual Studio must be able authenticate into AWS to gain access to AWS resources. To do this, you will need the AWS Tool to Visual Studio with a set credentials that it can use for access to AWS. While the AWS root account could be used for this purpose it would pose a significant security risk. AWS recommends you create an IAM account instead and use the credentials associated with it.
Log in to AWS Cloud and visit this page to create an IAM account. Next, click on the Create New user button and select the Users tab as shown in Figure 2.
[Click on the image to see a larger version.] Figure 2: Select the Users box and click the Create New user button. Now you will be asked to enter a name to each user account you wish to create. In the provided space, enter a name to your new IAM account. Click Create to ensure that Generate an AccessKey for Each User is checked. After clicking Create, you will see a message confirming that your user account was created successfully.
