Agents are designed to be capable of operating on desktop VMs. Running a full VM locally can consume a fair amount of resources, it’s often preferred to run the VM in the cloud. This section will walk you through how to set up a AWS account from scratch to run a VM.

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Prerequisites

  • A valid email address
  • A credit card for billing (AWS offers a free tier for new users)

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Step 1: Create an AWS Account

  1. Go to the AWS website.
  2. Click on the Create an AWS Account button.
  3. Follow the on-screen instructions to create a new AWS account.
  4. Set up your billing information to access the free tier.

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Step 2: Create Access Keys for Your IAM User

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console.
  2. Go to the IAM service from the Services menu.
  3. Click on Users in the left-hand menu.
  4. Select your user name from the list.
  5. Click on the Security credentials tab.
  6. Scroll down to the Access keys section and click on Create access key.
  7. Download the CSV file containing the user’s access key ID and secret access key.

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Step 3: Install and Configure AWS CLI

  1. Download and install the AWS CLI.
  2. Open a terminal or command prompt.
  3. Configure the AWS CLI with your user’s access key ID and secret access key: 
    aws configure
    Follow the prompts to enter your access key ID, secret access key, default region name, and default output format.

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Step 4: Verify Permissions and Create an EC2 Instance

  1. Verify that the CLI is authenticated and can access the EC2 service: 
    aws ec2 describe-instances

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Additional Considerations: Quotas

By default, AWS provides sufficient quotas for most users. However, if you need to increase quotas for your account:
  1. Go to the Service Quotas service from the Services menu.
  2. Find the quota you need to increase (e.g., Running On-Demand Standard (A, C, D, H, I, M, R, T, Z) instances).
  3. Click on the quota, then click on Request quota increase.
  4. Fill out the request form and submit it. AWS will review your request and notify you of the outcome.

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Conclusion

You have now successfully created an AWS account, set up the necessary permissions, and authenticated the CLI to create EC2 instances. For more advanced configurations and management, refer to the AWS documentation. If you have not already run through our Quickstart to setup surfkit, please do that now. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to create an AWS cloud VM for an agent to use with the following command: 
surfkit create device --provider ec2 -n my-surfkit-vm
Replace my-surfkit-vm with whatever friendly name you want to use.