Create a new user for your cloud machine

Login to your machine

Once you created an instance, you should be able to login via ssh.

You can see how to login and the machine ip in the detail page.

Then open your commandline tool and type…

ssh root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to your ip address, then enter your password.

Create a new user

Once, you logged in successfully, we need to create a new user to replace root for security reason.

To create a new user can be simple just type…

adduser USERNAME

Replace USERNAME to whatever you want.

Then follow the instruction to fill the information or you can just skip it.

Give sudo privilege to your user

After the user created, you need to give sudo right to the user, so the user can perform administrative tasks.

To assign the privilege

usermod -aG sudo USERNAME

Then check if the change works

groups USERNAME

Replace USERNAME to the user that you just created.

Login again with new user account

Before, we were using ssh root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to login, but now you can use ssh USERNAME@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to login to see if everything works properly.