An EC2 instance has 4 state of life cycle: running, stopped, and terminated. Furthermore, state transition (or action) of an EC2 instance is launch, rebooting, pending, shutting-down, and stopping, see <ec2_life_cycle>. Figure 1: EC2 instance life cycle Validating that you have correct setup This article assumes that you have setup AWS credentials in your terminal environment. You can check out one of my article named “Setup AWS credentials for your AWS account and create new user” to help you set things up.

In AWS IAM, a policy is the smallest entity of permission. There are types of policies: resources-based policy, identity-based policy, and session-based policy. Figure 1: aws policies Policies can be attached to the following “identity”: user (1 account can have more than 1 users), role, and group (a group has many user) 1. user, role, and group are called identity. In AWS identity is called IAM identity and user, role, and group are called IAM user, IAM role, and IAM user group, respectively.