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