Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Setting up access for Amazon SNS

Before you can use Amazon SNS for the first time, you must complete the following steps.

Step 1: Create an Amazon Web Services account and an IAM user

To access any Amazon service, you must first create an Amazon Web Services account. You can use your Amazon Web Services account to view your activity and usage reports and to manage authentication and access.

Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account

If you do not have an Amazon Web Services account, use the following procedure to create one.

Amazon sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by going to http://www.amazonaws.cn/ and choosing My Account.

Secure IAM users

After you sign up for an Amazon Web Services account, safeguard your administrative user by turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA). For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for an IAM user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

To give other users access to your Amazon Web Services account resources, create IAM users. To secure your IAM users, turn on MFA and only give the IAM users the permissions needed to perform their tasks.

For more information about creating and securing IAM users, see the following topics in the IAM User Guide:

Next steps

Now that you're prepared to work with Amazon SNS, get started by creating a topic, creating a subscription for the topic, publishing a message to the topic, and deleting the subscription and topic.