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30 January 2017

aws cli AuthFailure gotcha

by Alpha01

It’s probably been about 5-6 years since the last time I’ve used the AWS command line tools. The other day I signed up for the AWS Free Tier to familiarize myself with the aws command-line tools once again. I created myself a test user and granted full access to my aws account. Easy and simple. Well not so fast, initially my user account failed to authenticate properly. I tried re-generating new API keys and even created other different accounts with different types of access, but the problem persisted.

Problem

I was getting the following error:

[root@bashninja ~]# aws ec2 describe-regions

An error occurred (AuthFailure) when calling the DescribeRegions operation: AWS was not able to validate the provided access credentials

I verified my AWS API credentials stored on ~/.aws/credentials to ensure everything was correct. Yet, the fucking problem persisted.

Fix

It turned out that the time on the system I was trying to use the aws cli tools in, had the time completely wrong! Once the time was fixed I was able to authenticate my account and use the aws cli tool.

Tags: [ aws python ]