Setting up a machine to do development with Amazon Web Services is not difficult.  What follows is a quick guide. 

First, make sure you have signed up for an account.  This is very simple.  Just go to http://aws.amazon.com/ and click Sign Up Now.  Follow the instructions. Be sure and generate an X.509 certificate while you are there.  In the instructions that follow, please make the following substitutions:

• ACCESS_KEY_ID
  • Amazon will assign this to you when you set-up your account
• SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
  
  • Amazon will assign this to you when you set-up your account
• PRIVATE_KEY
  
  • When you created your X.509 certificate, you will download a private key file.  The name of the file will be something like this: pk-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.pem
• PUBLIC_KEY 
  
  • When you created your X.509 certificate, you will also download a public key file.  The name of the file will be something like this: cert-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.pem

Download the Amazon EC2 Command-Line tools from here. You will end up with a file called ec2-api-tools.zip. Unzip it and put the resulting folder in /opt. Create a symbolic link in /opt called ec2 that points to this folder.

Update $HOME/.bashrc as follows:

# Update the following as necessary to point to your correct java installation

export JAVA_HOME='/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun'

# Configuration variables needed for the AWS tools

# See http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2008-05-05/GettingStartedGuide/

export EC2_HOME='/opt/ec2'

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY="$HOME/.ec2/PRIVATE_KEY"

export EC2_CERT="$HOME/.ec2/PUBLIC_KEY"

# Append the Amazon ec2 tools to the path

if [ -d $EC2_HOME ] ; then

    export PATH="${PATH}:${EC2_HOME}/bin"

fi

Put copies of the PUBLIC_KEY file and PRIVATE_KEY file in $HOME/.ec2. 

After doing all of this, you will want to create an SSH key-pair.  Just do the following:

$ mkdir -p ~/.ssh

$ cd ~/.ssh

$ ec2-add-keypair ec2-keypair > ec2-keypair.pem