Preparations before attending to AWS Serverless Workshop

Prerequisites

A laptop with Node 6 (6.10.1 recommended) installed
An AWS account (https://aws.amazon.com/free)
AWS CLI [recommended] (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html OR brew install awscli for OSX homebrew users)
Git client [recommended] (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git)

Prepare AWS account

Log in to AWS
Go to Services -> Identity and Access Management
Create new user - take note of the access key and secret
Click on the new user and select the Permissions tab
Attach the Administrator access policy to the user

Note: In real life scenarios, you would not assign administrator privileges but more fine-grained permissions.

Setting AWS Access on laptop

If you have installed the AWS CLI, the aws configure command is the fastest way to set up your AWS credentials. (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html)

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: ExampleAccessKeyId
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: ExampleSecretAccessKey
Default region name [None]: us-east-1
Default output format [None]: json

Alternatively, you can add the credentials to your system manually:

Create directory .aws to your home folder
Copy file config to your .aws folder
Copy file credentials to your .aws folder
Enter the access key and secret key for your AWS account to the credentials file

Testing the setup

Create directory workshop and under that new directory awstest
Change directory to awstest, run npm install aws-sdk
Copy file awstest.js to your awstest directory
Run node awstest.js

You should get your IAM account name as a response if set up correctly.

Install Serverless Framework

Run npm install -g serverless@1.16.0
Run sls --version to verify installation