User guide

AWS SDK for .NET Tutorials and

Examples

This chapter provides tutorials, walkthroughs, and examples of programming Amazon Web Services with

the AWS SDK for .NET. Since these topics generally provide buildable and runnable examples of SDK

for .NET programming, it is expected that you have already set up the AWS SDK for .NET (p. 3) and

that you understand the material in the Programming with the AWS SDK for .NET (p. 8) chapter.

Topics

• Using IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 Instances with the AWS SDK for .NET (p. 31)

• Managing ASP.NET Session State with Amazon DynamoDB (p. 39)

• Tutorial: Creating Amazon EC2 Instances with the AWS SDK for .NET (p. 43)

• Tutorial: Amazon EC2 Spot Instances (p. 52)

• Creating and Using an Amazon SQS Queue with the AWS SDK for .NET (p. 60)

Using IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 Instances with

the AWS SDK for .NET

Note

For in-depth information about IAM roles for Amazon EC2 instances, go to Using Identity and

Access Management.

Securely managing authentication credentials is one of the challenges developers face when writing

software that accesses Amazon Web Services (AWS). All requests to AWS must be cryptographically

signed using credentials issued by AWS. For software that runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

(Amazon EC2) instances, developers must store these credentials in a way that keeps them secure but

also accessible to the software, which needs them in order to make requests.

IAM roles for Amazon EC2 instances provides an effective way to manage credentials for AWS software

running on EC2 instances. This section describes IAM roles for Amazon EC2 instances and shows how

it works with a sample .NET program. But first, let's examine some common strategies for managing

credentials and the issues that arise when using them.

One strategy is to first launch an Amazon EC2 instance and then securely transfer the credentials to the

instance using a utility such as scp (secure copy). However, this strategy doesn't scale well to large

Version v2.0.0

AWS SDK for .NET Developer Guide

IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 Instances