Installing Google Authenticator

The steps described in this section are completely optional, however, as a security best practice you should always enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on your root account. In fact, you should enable this for all user-based access to your AWS accounts, regardless of the level of access required. Enabling MFA is increasingly becoming a mandatory requirement for many organizations using AWS, so getting used to working with AWS when MFA is involved is important. Consequently, we will actually use MFA throughout this book.

Before you can use MFA, you need to have an MFA device, which can be a hardware or virtual MFA device. A virtual MFA device is typically installed in the form of an application on your smart phone, completing the multi-factor paradigm of something you know (password) and something you have (your phone).

A popular MFA application available for both Android and iOS is the Google Authenticator app, which you can download from the Google Play or Apple App Stores. Once you have installed the application, you can proceed to logging into the root account and setting up MFA access.