Lab Guide: Getting Start with Amazon Redshift

Welcome to QA's lab guide for Getting Started with Amazon Redshift!

As one of our getting started Hands-on Labs, students can find this lab particularly confusing as the subject matter is difficult for new students. There are three areas in the lab that students report the most difficulties in. Let's take a look at each one below:

• Connecting to the EC2
• IAM Permission Errors
• Connecting to the Redshift Custer

Connecting to the EC2

1. Ensure that the lab environment has loaded 100% prior to logging into the AWS console:

2. Log in to the AWS console using the provided credential for the lab session.

3. Ensure that the previous step (Creating the Redshift Cluster) was completed by following the instructions strictly.

4. Once you get to this step: Connecting to the Virtual Machine using EC2 Instance Connect:

   1. Go to instances and connect to the instance with "cloudacademylabs" in the name:

   2. Ensure that you are connecting using "ec2 instance connect" and the user name is "ec2-user"

   3. This should open a new tab and connect you to the instance Linux shell after a few seconds:

If you are getting the error on this part, please ensure you are connecting using the correct instance connection and user name. The auto-populated user name is "root" make sure to change it to "ec2-user".

If you can’t connect, here are a few troubleshooting steps you can take: 

1. Log off from the platform and close all open browsers
2. Clear cache and cookies. (It's very important to clear the stored URL that may have been causing the error leading to the broken link)
3. Ensure direct network connectivity is used versus VPN/proxy, which tends to block the connection
4. Please make sure no antivirus or firewall is blocking the environment from opening
5. Start a fresh browser, log in, and allow cookies if prompted.

IAM Permission Errors

IAM permission errors are also common in this lab. If you see them, that means that you misconfigured a resource in the lab and that the restrictions we place on your student account blocked you from continuing. Make sure you selected the correct region and that all settings, values, and names are exactly as described in the instructions, including capitalization. 

Connecting to the Redshift Custer

This can be tricky if you don't have your command exactly right. Make sure your command looks like my example below. Note that your cluster endpoint name will be different: 

psql -h redshift-cluster-1.crdeqbzbusel.us-west-2.redshift.amazonaws.com -U castudent -d caredshiftlab -p 5439

The endpoint is this part: redshift-cluster-1.crdeqbzbusel.us-west-2.redshift.amazonaws.com

Make sure you used the same user name and password during your setup that we have in the instructions and that you have replaced the endpoint with the unique cluster endpoint from your lab environment and didn't accidentally copy and paste the example endpoint from inside our instructions. 

I hope this helps! If you have any additional questions or concerns, please email support@cloudacademy.com

Happy Training!