Before you set up Amazon EMR
Complete the preliminary tasks detailed in this section before you launch an Amazon EMR cluster for the first time. These include setting up your AWS account if you need one and and taking steps to set up secure communication.
Sign up for an AWS account
To get started with AWS, you need an AWS account. For information about creating an AWS account, see Getting started with an AWS account in the AWS Account Management Reference Guide.
Create an Amazon EC2 key pair for SSH
Note
With Amazon EMR release versions 5.10.0 or later, you can configure Kerberos to authenticate users and SSH connections to a cluster. For more information, see Use Kerberos for authentication with Amazon EMR.
To authenticate and connect to the nodes in a cluster over a secure channel using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) key pair before you launch the cluster. You can also create a cluster without a key pair. This is usually done with transient clusters that start, run steps, and then terminate automatically.
| If... | Then... |
|---|---|
|
You already have an Amazon EC2 key pair that you want to use, or you don't need to authenticate to your cluster. |
Skip this step. |
| You need to create a key pair. | See Creating your key pair using Amazon EC2. |
Next steps
For guidance on creating a sample cluster, see Tutorial: Getting started with Amazon EMR.
For more information on how to configure a custom cluster and control access to it, see Plan, configure and launch Amazon EMR clusters and Security in Amazon EMR.
