Creating a new Amazon AWS Account

Continuing along with my journey into the cloud, I spent 10 minutes creating a new Amazon AWS account.  I started with a link for Try Cloud Computing Free and pressed the easy button:

If you've ever created an account, well anywhere, this process should be fairly old hat.  Even though you are signing up for a free trial account, you do need to provide a credit card (in case you go over the free limits).  There was one additional step which was unusual: confirming your phone number.  Amazon generates a one-time PIN and calls your number from an automated system to verify you - after punching in the PIN, you continue on your merry way:

A few minutes later I received the "all done" email:

and my account setup was complete.  A quick trip to Amazon AWS and I logged in to the account console without issue:

Now that I have an account and EC2 tools installed locally, my next steps will be getting a local build environment up and running.  To be continued...