# Step 1 - Connect to AWS To get started with CloudRunr, you can quickly compare pricing estimates for your workloads across different cloud providers without any engineering effort or financial analysis on your part. Our tool handles the heavy lifting by examining your workloads and comparing services, such as VM types and technical specifications, in real-time as your AWS workload changes. ### Connecting Your AWS Account As the first step, you will need to connect your AWS account to CloudRunr. We adhere to the least privilege principle, which is an AWS security best practice. This means we only request minimal scoped permissions necessary for each action you take. ### Creating the CloudRunr ReadOnly IAM Role The CloudRunr ReadOnly IAM role policy is a pre-defined policy that grants read-only access to your billing information. This policy allows us to perform the following actions on all billing resources: * View billing reports * Access cost and usage reports * Retrieve other billing-related information To connect your AWS account, click the 'Connect AWS' button. This action will direct you to the AWS CloudFormation stack creation page. 1. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. 2. Check the box to proceed with the creation. After a few minutes, while AWS deploys the CloudFormation stack, you will be ready to view your pricing comparisons with other cloud providers using CloudRunr! If you have any questions or need assistance during this process, please reach out to our support team for help at --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://help.cloudrunr.co/getting-started/step-1-connect-to-aws.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.